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TROPICAL AFRICA 



BY 



HENRY DRUMMOND 



LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.G.S. 



WITH MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS 



TE^TH*£»jtlo4'.* 



NEW YORK: 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 

1903 



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PREFACE 

TO THE POPULAR EDITION 

In this new Edition the letterpress remains 
as it was. The older maps, however, are 
withdrawn, partly because the colours on maps 
of Africa change with kaleidoscopic sudden- 
ness, and the march of events has already- 
earned for these an unusually swift superan- 
nuation. 

The " Political Warning " also, owing to 
the splendid action of the British Government 
in taking Nyassaland under its charge, has 
happily lost its point. If, even in the most 
infinitesimal degree, this book has helped to 
ripen an action fraught with such importance 
to the future of Africa, the writing of it has 
met its full reward. 

I am asked by my publishers if I mean to 



i? 



VI PREFACE 



"reply to Mr. Stanley." This is an appalling 
prospect to a retired traveller, but on investi- 
gating the casus belli I find it not so alarming. 
It seems the great explorer demurs to my 
description of the Forest -country of East 
Central Africa, and pronounces it not the 
Africa he saw. Now, as Mr. Stanley has 
never been in my Africa, I do not wonder at 
this. What I do wonder at is that he should 
have conceived it possible I was describing 
his Forest-country — the Pigmies' Forest. But 
as I did not penetrate that cheerful jungle I 
could not, of course, describe it — especially 
as it was not discovered till after my book 
was written. 

Apart from the Route -map, I thought I 
had made it quite clear to what part of Africa 
I did refer, but as even a great explorer has 
missed this in his wanderings through these 
pages, I may quote the carefully limiting 
words again : " The description about to be 
given applies generally to Shirwa, the Shire 
Highlands, Nyassa, and the Nyassa- Tangan- 
yika plateau — regions which together make 



PREFACE vii 

up one of the great lobes of the heart of 
Africa." The next paragraph is that which 
is pilloried because it does not describe the 
whole of Africa. 

I may add that the fossils (p. 192) rescued 
from the shales of Maramura have recently 
been examined by Prof. T. Rupert Jones, and 
now rejoice in the name of Iridina oblonga. 

HENRY DRUMMOND. 



PREFACE 

TO THE FIRST EDITION 

It is the genial tax of literature upon Travel 
that those who have explored the regions of 
the uncivilised should open their bag of wonders 
before the world and celebrate their return to 
clothing in three or four volumes and a map. 
This exaction, in the nature of things, must 
shortly abolish itself; and meantime I would 
compound with any possible creditors by the 
reduced offer of three or four maps and a volume. 
As a minor traveller, whose assets are few, 
I have struggled to evade even this obligation, 
but having recently had to lecture on African 
subjects to various learned and unlearned 
Societies in England and America, it has been 
urged upon me that a few of the lecture-notes 
thrown into popular form might be useful as a 
general sketch of East Central Africa. Great 
books of travel have had their day. But small 



PREFACE 



books, with the larger features of a country 
lightly sketched, and just enough of narrative to 
make you feel that you are really there, have a 
function in helping the imagination of those 
who have not breath enough to keep up with 
the great explorers. 

The publication of " The White Ant " and 
" Mimicry" has been already forestalled by one 
of the monthly magazines ; and the " Geological 
Sketch " is rescued, and duly dusted, from the 
archives of the British Association. If the 
dust of science has been too freely shaken from 
the other chapters, the scientific reader will 
overlook it for the sake of an overworked 
public which has infinite trouble in getting 
itself mildly instructed and entertained without 
being disheartened by the heavy pomp of 
technical expression. 

If anything in a work of this class could 
pretend to a serious purpose, I do not conceal 
that, in addition to the mere desire to inform, 
a special reason exists just now for writing 
about Africa — a reason so urgent that I excuse 
myself with difficulty for introducing so grave 



PREFACE xi 

a problem in so slight a setting. The reader 

who runs his eye over the " Heart- Disease of 

Africa" will discover how great the need is 

for arousing afresh that truer interest in the 

Dark Continent which since Livingstone's 

time has almost died away. To many modern 

travellers Africa is simply a country to be 

explored ; to Livingstone it was a land to be 

pitied and redeemed. And recent events on 

Lake Nyassa have stirred a new desire in the 

hearts of those who care for native Africa that 

"the open sore of the world" should have a 

last and decisive treatment at the hands of 

England. 

HENRY DRUMMOND. 






, 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 



THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA : THE 
RIVERS ZAMBESI AND SHIRE" . 



CHAPTER II 



THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY : LAKES SHIRWA 



AND NYASSA 



CHAPTER III 



THE ASPECT OF THE HEART OF AFRICA : THE 



COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 



27 



49 



CHAPTER IV 

^)IE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA: ITS PATHOLOGY 



AND CURE 



67 



CHAPTER V 

PANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU : 
A TRAVELLER'S DIARY 



87 



COXTENTS 



CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

THE WHITE ANT : A THEORY 12 1 



CHAPTER VII 

MIMICRY: THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS . . I 59 

CHAPTER VIII 

A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH l8l 

CHAPTER IX 

A POLITICAL 'WARNING . 201 

CHAPTER X 

A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE . . . , 223 



THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART 
OF AFRICA 

THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 



I 

THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF 
AFRICA 

THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 

'TpHREE distinct Africas are known to the 
-*- modern world — North Africa, where men go 
for health ; South Africa, where they go for money ; 
and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. 
The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, 
every one knows from history ; the geography of 
the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, 
has been taught us by two Universal Educators — 
War and the Stock -Exchange ; but our knowledge 
of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, 
is still fitly symbolised by the vacant look upon our 
maps which tells how long this mysterious land has 
kept its secret. 

Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to 
take you with me now. And let me magnify my 



4 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

subject by saying at once that it is a wonderful 
thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from 
the civilisation of Europe, pass up these mighty 
rivers, and work your way into that unknown land 
— work your way alone, and on foot, mile after mile, 
month after month, among strange birds and beasts 
and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no 
name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, 
till you have reached its secret heart, and stood 
where white man has never trod before. It is a 
wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human 
beings — half animal half children, wholly savage and 
wholly heathen ; and to turn and come back again 
to civilisation before the impressions have had time 
to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange 
a spectacle are still seething in the mind. It is an 
education to see this sight — an education in the 
meaning and history of man. To have been here is 
to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched 
the dawn of evolution. It is to have the great 
moral and social problems of life, of anthropology, 
of ethnology, and even of theology, brought home to 
the imagination in the most new and startling light. 
On the longest day of a recent summer — mid- 
winter therefore in the tropics — I left London. A 
long railway run across France, Switzerland, and 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 



Italy brings one in a day or two to the Mediter- 
ranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes 
across Egypt, over the Nile, through the battlefield 
of Tel-el-Kebir, to the Red Sea, steams down its 
sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and, after three 
lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west 
Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar. 

Zanzibar is the focus of all East African explora- 
tion. No matter where you are going in the interior, 
you must begin at Zanzibar. Oriental in its appear- 
ance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its 
morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital 
for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar 
simply because it is the only apology for a town on 
the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to 
penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here 
only can the traveller make up his caravan. The 
ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a pro- 
fession, and everything the explorer wants is to be 
had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a 
repeating rifle. Here these black villains the porters, 
the necessity and the despair of travellers, the scum 
of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from justice from 
every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one 
thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, 
it is that for laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wicked- 



6 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

ness, these men are not to be matched on any con- 
tinent in the world. Their one strong point is that 
they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza 
or for the Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as 
little ado as a Chamounix guide volunteers for the 
Jardin ; but this singular avidity is mainly due to 
the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running 
away at the earliest opportunity. Were it only to 
avoid requiring to employ these gentlemen, having 
them for one's sole company month after month, 
seeing them transgress every commandment in turn 
before your eyes — you yourself being powerless to 
check them except by a wholesale breach of the 
sixth — it would be worth while to seek another 
route into the heart of Africa. 

But there is a much graver objection to the Zan- 
zibar route to the interior. Stanley started by this 
route on his search for Livingstone, two white men 
with him ; he came back without them. Cameron 
set out by the same path to cross Africa with two 
companions ; before he got to Tanganyika he was 
alone. The Geographical Society's late expedition, 
under Mr. Keith Johnston, started from Zanzibar 
with two Europeans ; the hardy and accomplished 
leader fell within a couple of months. These expe- 
ditions have all gone into the interior by this one 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 



fatal way, and probably every second man, by fevei 
or by accident, has left his bones to bleach along 
the road. Hitherto there has been no help for it. 
The great malarious coast-belt must be crossed, and 
one had simply to take his life in his hands and go 
through with it. 

But now there is an alternative. There is a rival 
route into the interior, which, though it is not with- 
out its dark places too, will probably yet become the 
great highway from the East to Central Africa. 
Let me briefly sketch it. 

Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed 
triangle. It has no peninsulas ; it has almost no 
islands or bays or fjords. But three great inlets, 
three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, 
have been allocated by a kind Nature one to each 
of its solid sides. On the north is the river of the 
past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh Hunt says, 
" like some grave, mighty thought threading a 
dream " ; on the west the river of the future, the not 
less mysterious Congo ; and on the east the little- 
known Zambesi. 

The physical features of this great continent are 
easily grasped. From the coast a low scorched 
plain, reeking with malaria, extends inland in 
unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. 



8 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

This is succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a 
plateau some 2000 or 3000 feet high ; and this, at 
some hundreds of miles distance, forms the pedestal 
for a second plateau as high again. This last 
plateau, 4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to 
occupy the whole of Central Africa. It is only on 
the large scale, however, that these are to be reckoned 
plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees 
nothing but mountains and valleys and plains of 
the ordinary type, covered for the most part with 
forest. 

I have said that Nature has supplied each side 
of Africa with one great river. By going some 
hundreds of miles southward along the coast from 
Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the 
Zambesi. Livingstone sailed up this river once, and 
about a hundred miles from its mouth discovered 
another river twisting away northwards among the 
mountains. The great explorer was not the man to 
lose such a chance of penetrating the interior. He 
followed this river up, and after many wanderings 
found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The 
river is named the Shir6, and the lake — the exist- 
ence of which was quite unknown before, is Lake 
Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long; so that, 
with the Zambesi, the Shire, and this great lake, we 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 



have the one thing required to open up East Central 
Africa — a water-route to the interior. But this is 
not all. Two hundred and fifty miles from the end 
of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler propor- 
tions takes up the thread of communication. Lake 
Tanganyika is 450 miles in length. Between the 
lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy, accessible, 
and without any physical barrier to interrupt the 
explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza 
and the Albert Nyanza may be approached with 
less fatigue, less risk, and not less speed, than by the 
overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also, 
along this line, one is within a short march of that 
other great route which must ever be regarded as 
the trunk-line of the African continent. The water- 
shed of the Congo lies on this Nyassa-Tanganyika 
plateau. This is the stupendous natural -highway 
on which so much of the future of East Central 
Africa must yet depend. 

Ten days languid steaming from Zanzibar brings 
the traveller to the Zambesi mouth. The bar here 
has an evil reputation, and the port is fixed on a 
little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly 
to the north, but the upper reaches of which almost 
join the Zambesi at some distance inland. This port 
is the Portuguese settlement of Quilimane, and here 



io WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

I said good-bye to the steamer and to civilisation. 
Some distance in the interior stands a solitary pioneer 
Mission station of the Established Church of Scot- 
land, and still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another 
outpost of a sister church. My route led past both 
these stations, and I had the good fortune to pick 
up on the way two or three young fellow-country- 
men who were going up to relieve the mission staff. 
For the latter part of my journey I was quite alone. 
All African work, as a rule, is done single-handed. 
It is not always easy to find a companion for such a 
project, and the climate is so pestilential that when 
two go, you and your friend are simply nursing each 
other time about, and the expedition never gets on. 
On the whole, however, the solitary course is not to 
be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes 
over one at times in the great still forests, and there 
is a stage in African fever — and every one must 
have fever — when the watchful hand of a friend may 
make the difference between life and death. 

After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our 
journey up the Qua-qua was one long picnic. We 
had two small row-boats, the sterns covered with a 
sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and 
talked, and read and prospected, from dawn to sun- 
set. Each boat was paddled by seven or eight 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 



natives — muscular heathens, whose sole dress was 
a pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few 
mosquitoes. Except at first the river was only a 
few yards broad, and changed in character and 
novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove 
of cocoa-nut palms — the most wonderful and beau- 
tiful tree of the tropics. Now its sullen current 
oozed through a foetid swamp of mangroves — the 
home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose 
slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash 
as our boats sped past. Again the banks became 
green and graceful, the long plumed grasses bending 
to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of birds 
— the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the 
exquisite blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its 
prey from the overhanging boughs. The business- 
like air of this last bird is almost comical, and some- 
how sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. 
One expects him to flutter away before the approach 
of so material a thing as a boat, display his fairy 
plumage in a few airy movements, and melt away in 
the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and impass- 
ive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes 
in his face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses 
to acknowledge the intruder by so much as a glance. 
His larger ally, the black and white spotted king- 



12 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

fisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic, and 
darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the 
boat from reach to reach, and seldom allowing an 
inspection close enough to take in the details of his 
piebald coat. 

One interests oneself in these things more par- 
ticularly because there is nothing at first especially 
striking about the river scenery itself. Ten or 
twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side, 
and large and varied features are wanting. The 
banks are lined with the densest jungle of mangroves 
and aquatic grasses, while creepers of a hundred 
kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. 
We saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count 
was very soon lost. They were of all sizes, from 
the baby specimen which one might take home in a 
bottle, to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of 
an 8 1 -ton gun. These revolting animals take their 
siesta in the heat of the day, lying prone upon the 
bank, with their wedge - shaped heads directed 
towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle 
into the river with a wriggling movement, the pre- 
cipitancy of which defies the power of sight. The 
adjustment of the adult crocodile to its environment 
in the matter of colour is quite remarkable. The 
younger forms are lighter yellow, and more easily 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 13 

discoverable, but it takes the careful use of a good 
pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled slime- 
covered log lying among the rotting stumps the 
living form of the mature specimen. Between the 
African crocodiles and the alligators there is the 
slightest possible external difference ; although the 
longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed 
feet with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and 
the protrusion of the large canine, distinguish them 
from their American allies. 

Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for 
food for the men, who, like all Africans, will do any- 
thing for flesh in whatever form. For ourselves, we 
lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats, cook- 
ing them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped 
Eggs are never eaten by the natives, but always set ; 
although, if you offer to buy them, the natives will 
bring you a dozen from a sitting hen, which they 
assure you were laid that very morning. In the 
interior, on many occasions afterwards, these protesta- 
tions were tested, and always proved false. One time, 
when nearly famished and far from camp, I was 
brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed 
had that very hour been laid. With sincere hope 
that he might be right, but with much misgiving, I 
ordered the two freshest-looking to be boiled. With 



i 4 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

the despair of a starving man I opened them. They 
were cock and hen. 

Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the 
same in Africa. There is no beef, nor mutton, nor 
bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt, nor anything 
whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an English- 
man can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he 
must carry with him. No one has any idea of what 
can be had in tins till he camps out abroad. Every 
conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had 
tinned, every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, 
every species of vegetable and fruit, every soup, sweet, 
and entree ; but after two or three months of this 
sort of thing you learn that this tempting semblance 
of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole differ- 
ence between these various articles lies, like the Rhine 
wines, in the label. Plum pudding or kippered her- 
ring taste just the same. Whether you begin dinner 
with tinned calves -foot jelly or end with tinned 
salmon makes no difference ; and after six months 
it is only by a slight feeling of hardness that you do 
not swallow the tins themselves. 

At the end of a too short week we left our boats 
behind. Engaging an army of shy natives at a few 
huts near the bank, we struck across a low neck o\ 
land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves sud- 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 15 

denly on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary 
bungalow was in sight, and opposite it the little 
steamer of the African Lakes Company, which was 
to take us up the Shire. There is more in the asso- 
ciation, perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one 
as he first furrows the waters of this virgin river. 
We are fifty miles from its mouth, the mile-wide 
water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks 
fringed with alligators and wild birds. The great 
deltoid plain, yellow with sun -tanned reeds and 
sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every side ; 
the sun is blistering hot ; the sky, as it will be for 
months, a monotonous dome of blue — not a frank 
bright blue like the Canadian sky, but a veiled blue, 
a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due to the 
perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, 
for the Zambesi is no friend to the European, and 
this whole region is heavy with depressing memories. 
This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the 
fact that we were to spend that night within a few 
yards of the place where Mrs. Livingstone died. 
Late in the afternoon we reached the spot — a low 
ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, 
with a broad verandah shading its crumbling walls. 
A grass-grown path straggled to the doorway, and 
the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how neglected 



1 6 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found 
ourselves in a long dark room, its mud floor broken 
into fragments, and remains of native fires betraying 
its latest occupants. Turning to the right, we entered 
a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with two 
glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun, 
setting over the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled 
the room with its soft glow, and took our thoughts 
back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago, when 
in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone 
knelt over his dying wife, and witnessed the great 
sunset of his life. 

Under a huge baobab tree — a miracle of vege- 
table vitality and luxuriance — stands Mrs. Living- 
stone's grave. The picture in Livingstone's book 
represents the place as well kept and surrounded 
with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter 
wilderness, matted with jungle grass and trodden by 
the beasts of the forest ; and as I looked at the for- 
saken mound and contrasted it with her husband's 
tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the 
woman's love which brought her to a spot like this 
might be not less worthy of immortality. 

The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, 
and after the Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most 
important on the continent. Rising in the far 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 17 

interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and 

gathering volume from the streams which flow from 

the high lands connecting the north of Lake Nyassa 

with Inner Angola, it curves across the country for 

over a thousand miles like an attenuated letter S, and 

before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled 

waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of 

more than half a million square miles. As it cuts its 

way down the successive steps of the central plateaux 

its usually placid current is interrupted by rapids, 

narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the 

plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is 

only navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles 

at a time. From the coast the Zambesi might be 

stemmed by steam-power to the rapids of Kebrabasa ; 

and from above that point intermittently, as far as the 

impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, 

for some distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, 

but these are at length succeeded by an unbroken 

chain of tributaries which together form an inland 

waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad 

lands along the banks of this noble river are subject 

to annual inundations like the region of the Nile, and 

hence their agricultural possibilities are unlimited. 

On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchilla weed, and 

calumba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane 

c 



18 WATER- ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

could be produced in quantity to supply the whole 
of Europe. At present owing to apathy and in- 
different government these magnificent resources are 
almost wholly undeveloped. 

Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi 
in its wake and struck up a fine lake-like expansion 
to the north, which represents the mouth of the Shire. 
Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a better stream 
for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also 
is really fine, especially as one nears the mountains 
of the plateau, and the strange peoples and animals 
along the banks occupy the mind with perpetual 
interests. The hippopotami prowling round the boat 
and tromboning at us within pistol-shot kept us 
awake at night ; and during the day we could see 
elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other large game 
wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at 
home is a sight to remember. The stupendous 
awkwardness of the menagerie animal, as if so large 
a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes completely 
when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he 
is c.s nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly 
this moving mountain is adapted to its habitat — how 
such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as natural to 
these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. 
We were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 19 

all at this stage, and I question whether there is any 
other part of Africa where these animals may be 
observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of 
London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition 
was ten months in the country before he saw any ; 
and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his long journey to 
Tanganyika and back, never came across a single 
elephant. It is said that the whale which all travel- 
lers see in crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the 
steamboat companies, but I vouch that these Shire* 
valley elephants are independent of subsidy. 

The question of the disappearance of the elephant 
here and throughout Africa is, as every one knows, 
only one of a few years. It is hard to think why 
this kindly and sagacious creature should have to be 
exterminated ; why this vast store of animal energy, 
which might be turned into so much useful work, 
should be lost to civilisation. But the causes are 
not difficult to understand. The African elephant 
has never been successfully tamed, and is therefore 
a failure as a source of energy. As a source of 
ivory, on the other hand, he has been but too great 
a success. The cost of ivory at present is about 
half-a-sovereign per pound. An average tusk weighs 
from twenty to thirty pounds. Each animal has 
two and in Africa both male and female carry tusks. 



20 WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

The average elephant is therefore worth in pounds 
sterling the weight in pounds avoirdupois of one of 
his tusks. I have frequently seen single tusks turn- 
ing the scale upon ninety pounds, the pair in this 
case being worth nearly £ i oo sterling, — so that a 
herd of elephants is about as valuable as a gold 
mine. The temptation to sacrifice the animal for 
his tusks is therefore great ; and as he becomes 
scarcer he will be pursued by the hunter with ever- 
increasing eagerness. But the truth is, sad though 
the confession be, the sooner the last elephant falls 
before the hunter's bullet the better for Africa. 
Ivory introduces into the country at present an 
abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is 
set so enormous a premium that none other among 
African products secures the slightest general atten- 
tion ; nor will almost anyone in the interior con- 
descend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the 
legitimate industries of the country, so long as a 
tusk remains. In addition to this, of half the real 
woes which now exist in Africa ivory is at the 
bottom. It is not only that wherever there is an 
article to which a fictitious value is attached the 
effect upon the producer is apt to be injurious ; nor 
that wherever there is money there is temptation, 
covetousness, and war ; but that unprincipled men 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 2] 



and especially Arabs, are brought into contact with 
the natives in the worst relation, influence them only 
in one and that the lowest direction, and leave them 
always worse than they find them — worse in greed, 
in knavery, in their belief in mankind, and in their 
suspicion of civilisation. Further, for every tusk an 
Arab trader purchases he must buy, borrow, or steal 
a slave to carry it to the coast. Domestic slavery 
is bad enough, but now begins the long slave-march 
with its untold horrors — horrors instigated and per- 
petuated almost solely by the traffic in ivory. The 
extermination of the elephant, therefore, will mark 
one stage at least in the closing up of the slave- 
trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. 
The best he can do now for his country is to dis- 
appear for ever. 

In books of travel great chiefs are usually called 
kings, their wives queens, while their mud-huts are 
always palaces. But after seeing my first African 
chief at home, I found I must either change my 
views of kings or of authors. The regal splendour 
of Chipitula's court — and Chipitula was a very great 
chief indeed, and owned all the Shir6 district — may 
be judged of by the fact that when I paid my 
respects to his highness his court -dress consisted 
almost exclusively of a pair of suspenders. I made 



22 WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

this king happy for life by the gift of a scarlet tennis- 
cap and a few buttons. But poor Chipitula had not 
long to enjoy his treasures, — and I mention the 
incident to show what is going on every day in 
Africa. When I came back that way, on my return 
journey, I called again to receive a leopard skin 
which this chief had promised to trap for me, and 
for which he was to get in exchange certain dilapi- 
dated remnants of my wardrobe. He gave me the 
skin ; I duly covered his, and we parted. A few 
days after, another white man came that way ; he 
was a trader — the only one who has yet plied this 
hazardous calling in East Central Africa. He quar- 
relled with Chipitula over some bargain, and in a 
moment of passion drew his revolver and shot the 
chief dead on the spot. Of course he himself was 
instantly speared by Chipitula's men ; and all his 
black porters, according to native etiquette, were 
butchered with their master. There is absolutely 
no law in Africa, and you can kill anybody and 
anybody can kill you, and no one will ask any 
questions. 

Our next stoppage was to pay another homage — 
truly this is a tragic region — at another white man's 
grave. A few years ago Bishop Mackenzie and 
some other missionaries were sent to Africa by the 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIR A 23 

English Universities, with instructions to try to 
establish a Mission in the footsteps of Livingstone. 
They came here ; the climate overpowered them ; 
one by one they sickened and died. With the death 
of the Bishop himself the site was abandoned, and 
the few survivors returned home. Among the hip- 
popotamus-trampled reeds on the banks of the Shire\ 
under a rough iron cross, lies the first of three brave 
bishops who have already made their graves in 
Equatorial Africa. 

I have spoken of the Shire* as the great waterway 
into the interior of Eastern Africa. It has one 
defect After sailing for five or six days we came 
to rapids which no boat can pass. These rapids 
were named by Livingstone the Murchison Cataracts, 
and they extend for seventy miles. This distance, 
accordingly, must be traversed overland. Half-way 
up this seventy miles, and a considerable distance 
inland from the river, stands the first white settle- 
ment in East Central Africa — the Blantyre Mission. 
Bribing about a hundred natives with a promise of 
a fathom of calico each, to carry our luggage, we set 
off on foot for Blantyre. The traditional character- 
istics of African caravaning were displayed in full 
perfection during this first experience, and darkness 
fell when we were but half-way to our destination, 



24 WATER ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA 

It was our first night in the bush, and a somewhat 
unusual introduction to African travelling marked it. 
At midnight we were roused by startling cries from 
our men, who lay sleeping on the ground around us. 
The watch-fires must have burned down, for a lion 
had suddenly sprung into the camp. Seizing the 
man who lay nearest the forest, the animal buried its 
claws in his breast, and was making off into the 
darkness, when the shouting frightened it and made 
it drop its prey. Twice during the night the lion 
came back, and we whites had to keep watch by 
turns till morning with loaded rifles. This is alto- 
gether an exceptional case, for with a good fire one 
can generally spread his mat anywhere in the tropics 
without fear of midnight attack. This is a famous 
place, however, for lions, and one can as certainly 
depend on their gruesome concert in the early morn- 
ing as on the sparrows' chirp in England. 

Towards sunset the following evening our caravan 
filed into Blantyre. On the beauty and interest of 
this ideal mission I shall not dwell. But if anyone 
wishes to find out what can be done with the virgin 
African, what can be done by broad and practical 
missionary methods, let him visit the Rev. D. 
Clement Scott and his friends at Blantyre. And if 
he wishes to observe the possibilities of civilisation 



THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE 25 

and colonisation among an average African tribe 
living on an average African soil, let him examine 
the mission plantations, and those of Mr. John and 
Mr. Frederick Moir at Mandala, and of the Brothers 
Buchanan at Zomba. And, further, if he desires to 
know what the milk of human kindness is, let him 
time his attack of fever so that haply it may coincide 
with his visit to either of these centres of self-denying 
goodness and hospitality. 



II 

THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE 
COUNTRY 

LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA 



II 

THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 
LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA 

QOMEWHERE in the Shire Highlands, in 1859, 
*^ Livingstone saw a large lake — Lake Shirwa — 
which is still almost unknown. It lies away to the 
East, and is bounded by a range of mountains whose 
lofty summits are visible from the hills round 
Blantyre. Thinking it might be a useful initiation 
to African travel if I devoted a short time to its 
exploration, I set off one morning accompanied by 
two members of the Blantyre staff and a small 
retinue of natives. Steering across country in the 
direction in which it lay, we found, two days before 
seeing the actual water, that we were already on the 
ancient bed of the lake. Though now clothed with 
forest, the whole district has obviously been under 
water at a comparatively recent period, and the 
shores of Lake Shirwa probably reached at one time 



30 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

to within a few miles of Blantyre itself. On reach- 
ing the lake a very aged female chief came to see 
us, and told us how, long long ago, a white man 
came to her village and gave her a present of cloth 
Of the white man, who must have been Livingstone, 
she spoke very kindly ; and indeed, wherever David 
Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa the 
fragrance of his memory seems to remain. 

The waters of Shirwa are brackish to the taste, 
and undrinkable ; but the saltness must have a 
peculiar charm for game, for nowhere else in Africa 
did I see such splendid herds of the larger animals 
as here. The zebra was especially abundant ; and 
so unaccustomed to be disturbed are these creatures, 
that with a little care one could watch their move- 
ments safely within a very few yards. It may seem 
unorthodox to say so, but I do not know if among 
the larger animals there is anything handsomer in 
creation than the zebra. At close quarters his 
striped coat is all but as fine as the tiger's, while the 
form and movement of his body are in every way 
nobler. The gait, certainly, is not to be compared 
for gracefulness with that of the many species of 
antelope and deer who nibble the grass beside him, 
and one can never quite forget that scientifically he 
is an ass ; but taking him all in all, this fleet and 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 31 

beautiful animal ought to have a higher place in the 
regard of man than he has yet received. 

We were much surprised, considering that this 
region is almost uninhabited, to discover near the 
lake shore a native path so beaten, and so recently 
beaten, by multitudes of human feet, that it could 
only represent some trunk route through the conti- 
nent. Following it for a few miles, we soon discovered 
its function. It was one of the great slave routes 
through Africa. Signs of the horrid traffic soon 
became visible on every side ; and from symmetrical 
arrangements of small piles of stones and freshly-cut 
twigs, planted semaphore -wise upon the path, our 
native guides made out that a slave-caravan was 
actually passing at the time. We were, in fact, 
between two portions of it, the stones and twigs 
being telegraphic signals between front and rear. 
Our natives seemed much alarmed at this discovery, 
and refused to proceed unless we promised not to 
interfere — a proceeding which, had we attempted it, 
would simply have meant murder for ourselves and 
slavery for them. Next day, from a hill-top, we saw 
the slave encampment far below, and the ghastly 
procession marshalling for its march to the distant 
coast, which many of the hundreds who composed it 
would never reach alive. 



32 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

Talking of native footpaths leads me to turn 
aside for a moment to explain to the uninitiated 
the true mode of African travel. In spite of all the 
books that have been lavished upon us by our great 
explorers, few people seem to have any accurate 
understanding of this most simple process. Some 
have the impression that everything is done in 
builock-waggons — an idea borrowed from the Cape, 
but hopelessly inapplicable to Central Africa, where 
a wheel at present would be as great a novelty as a 
polar bear. Others at the opposite extreme suppose 
that the explorer works along solely by compass, 
making a bee-line for his destination, and steering 
his caravan through the trackless wilderness like a 
ship at sea. Now it may be a surprise to the unen- 
lightened to learn that probably no explorer in forc- 
ing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than 
a few days at a time, been off some beaten track. 
Probably no country in the world, civilised or un- 
civilised, is better supplied with paths than this 
unmapped continent. Every village is connected 
with some other village, ever)' tribe with the next 
tribe, every state with its neighbour, and therefore 
with all the rest. The explorer's business is simply 
to select from this network of tracks, keep a general 
direction, and hold on his way. Let him begin at 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 33 

Zanzibar, plant his foot on a native footpath, and 
set his face towards Tanganyika. In eight months 
he will be there. He has simply to persevere. From 
village to village he will be handed on, zigzagging 
it may be sometimes to avoid the impassable barriers 
of nature or the rarer perils of hostile tribes, but 
never taking to the woods, never guided solely by 
the stars, never in fact leaving a beaten track, till 
hundreds and hundreds of miles are between him 
and the sea, and his interminable footpath ends with 
a canoe, on the shores of Tanganyika. Crossing the 
lake, landing near some native village, he picks up 
the thread once more. Again he plods on and on, 
now on foot, now by canoe, but always keeping his 
line of villages, until one day suddenly he sniffs the 
sea-breeze again, and his faithful foot-wide guide 
lands him on the Atlantic seaboard. 

Nor is there any art in finding out these suc- 
cessive villages with their intercommunicating links. 
He must find them out. A whole army of guides, 
servants, carriers, soldiers, and camp-followers accom- 
pany him in his march, and this nondescript regiment 
must be fed. Indian corn, cassava, mawere, beans, 
and bananas — these do not grow wild even in Africa 
Every meal has to be bought and paid for in cloth 
and beads ; and scarcely three days can pass without 



34 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

a call having to be made at some village where the 
necessary supplies can be obtained. A caravan, as 
a rule, must live from hand to mouth, and its march 
becomes simply a regulated procession through a 
chain of markets. Not, however, that there are any 
real markets — there are neither bazaars nor stores in 
native Africa. Thousands of the villages through 
which the traveller eats his way may never have 
victualled a caravan before. But, with the chief's 
consent, which is usually easily purchased for a showy 
present, the villages unlock their larders, the women 
flock to the grinding stones, and basketfuls of food 
are swiftly exchanged for unknown equivalents in 
beads and calico. 

The native tracks which I have just described 
are the same in character all over Africa. They are 
veritable footpaths, never over a foot in breadth, 
beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the 
level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. 
As a rule these footpaths are marvellously direct. 
Like the roads of the old Romans, they run straight 
on through everything, ridge and mountain and valley, 
never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside 
to breathe. Yet within this general straightforward- 
ness there is a singular eccentricity and indirectness 
in detail. Although the African footpath is on the 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 35 

whole a bee-line, no fifty yards of it are ever straight. 
And the reason is not far to seek. If a stone is 
encountered no native will ever think of removing it. 
Why should he ? It is easier to walk round it. The 
next man who comes that way will do the same. He 
knows that a hundred men are following him ; he 
looks at the stone ; a moment, and it might be un- 
earthed and tossed aside, but no ; he also holds on 
his way. It is not that he resents the trouble, it is 
the idea that is wanting. It would no more occur 
to him that that stone was a displaceable object, and 
that for the general weal he might displace it, than 
that its feldspar was of the orthoclase variety. 
Generations and generations of men have passed 
that stone, and it still waits for a man with an 
altruistic idea. But it would be a very stony 
country indeed — and Africa is far from stony — that 
would wholly account for the aggravating oblique- 
ness and indecision of the African footpath. Prob- 
ably each four miles, on an average path, is spun 
out by an infinite series of minor sinuosities, to five 
or six. Now these deflections are not meaningless. 
Each has some history — a history dating back per- 
haps a thousand years, but to which all clue has 
centuries ago been lost. The leading cause probably 
is fallen trees. When a tree falls across a path no 



36 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

man ever removes it. As in the case of the stone, 
the native goes round it. It is too green to burn in 
his hut ; before it is dry, and the white ants have 
eaten it, the new detour has become part and parcel 
of the path. The smaller irregularities, on the other 
hand, represent the trees and stumps of the primeval 
forest where the track was made at first. But what- 
ever the cause, it is certain that for persistent 
straightforwardness in the general, and utter vacilla- 
tion and irresolution in the particular, the African 
roads are unique in engineering. 

Though one of the smaller African lakes, Shirwa 
is probably larger than all the lakes of Great Britain 
put together. With the splendid environment of 
mountains on three of its sides, softened and distanced 
by perpetual summer haze, it reminds one somewhat 
of the Great Salt Lake simmering in a July sun. We 
pitched our tent for a day or two on its western 
shore among a harmless and surprised people who 
had never gazed on the pallid countenances of 
Englishmen before. Owing to the ravages of the 
slaver the people of Shirwa are few, scattered and 
poor, and live in abiding terror. The densest popu- 
lation is to be found on the small island, heavily 
timbered with baobabs, which forms a picturesque 
feature of the northern end. These Wa-Nyassa, or 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 37 

people of the lake, as they call themselves, have 
been driven here by fear, and they rarely leave their 
Lake-Dwelling unless under cover of night. Even 
then they are liable to capture by any man of a 
stronger tribe who happens to meet them, and 
numbers who have been kidnapped in this way are 
to be found in the villages of neighbouring chiefs. 
This is an amenity of existence in Africa that strikes 
one as very terrible. It is impossible for those at 
home to understand how literally savage man is a 
chattel, and how much his life is spent in the mere 
safeguarding of his main asset, i.e. himself. There 
are actually districts in Africa where three natives 
cannot be sent a message in case two should combine 
and sell the third before they return. 

After some time spent in the Lake Shirwa and 
Shire districts, I set out for the Upper Shire and 
Lake Nyassa. Two short days' walk from the 
settlement at Blantyre brings one once more to 
the banks of the Shire. Here I found waiting 
the famous little Ilala, a tiny steamer, little 
bigger than a large steam launch. It belonged 
originally to the missionaries on Lake Nyassa, 
and was carried here a few years ago from 
England in seven hundred pieces, and bolted 
together on the river bank. No chapter in 



38 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

romance is more interesting than the story of the 
pioneer voyage of the Ilala, as it sailed away for 
the first time towards the unknown waters of Nyassa. 
No keel had ever broken the surface of this mighty 
lake before, and the wonderment of the natives as 
the Big Canoe hissed past their villages is described 
by those who witnessed it as a spectacle of indescrib- 
able interest. The Ilala is named, of course, after 
the village where David Livingstone breathed his 
last. It indicates the heroic mission of the little ship 
— to take up the work of Civilisation and Christianity 
where the great explorer left it The Ilala now plies 
at intervals between the Upper Shire — above the 
cataracts — and the shores of Lake Nyassa, carrying 
supplies to the handful of missionaries settled on the 
western shore. Though commanded by a white man, 
the work on board is entirely done by natives from 
the locality. The confidence of the black people 
once gained, no great difficulty seems to have been 
found in getting volunteers enough for this novel 
employment. Singularly enough, while deck hands 
are often only enlisted after some persuasion, the 
competition for the office of fireman — a disagreeable 
post at any time, but in the tropical heat the last to 
be coveted — is so keen that any number of natives 
are at all times ready to be frizzled in the stokehole. 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 39 

Instead of avoiding heat, the African native every- 
where courts it. His nature expands and revels in 
it ; while a breath of cold on a mountain slope, or a 
sudden shower of rain, transforms him instantly into 
a most woebegone object. 

After leaving Matope, just above the Murchison 
cataracts, the Ilala steams for a couple of days in the 
river before Lake Nyassa is reached. The valley 
throughout this length is very broad, bounded on 
either side by distant mountains which at an earlier 
period probably formed the shores of a larger Lake- 
Nyassa. The fact that Lake Nyassa is silting up at 
its southern end becomes more apparent as one nears 
the lake, for here one finds a considerable expanse 
already cut off from the larger portion, and forming 
a separate sheet of water. The smaller lake is Lake 
Pomalombe, and it is already so shallow that in the 
dry season the Ilala 's screw stirs the gray mud at 
the bottom. The friendship of the few villages along 
the bank is secured by an occasional present ; although 
the relations between some of them and the Big 
Canoe are at times a little strained, and in bad 
humours doubtless they would send it to the bottom 
if they dared. It is to be remembered that this 
whole region is as yet altogether beyond the limits, 
and almost beyond the knowledge, of civilisation, and 



*o THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

few white men have ever been in the country, except 
the few agents connected with the Lakes Company 
and the Missions. Beyond an occasional barter of 
cloth or beads for firewood and food, the Ilala has 
no dealings with the tribes on the Upper Shire\ and 
at present they are about as much affected by the 
passing to and fro of the white man's steamer as are 
the inhabitants of Kensington by an occasional wild- 
fowl making for Regent's Park. One is apt to con- 
clude, from the mere presence of such a thing as a 
steamer in Central Africa, that the country through 
which it is passing must be in some sense civilised, 
and the hourly reminders to the contrary which one 
receives on the spot are among the most startling 
experiences of the traveller. It is almost impossible 
for him to believe, as he watches the native life from 
the cabin of the Ilala y that these people are altogethei 
uncivilised ; just as it is impossible for him to believe 
that that lurch a moment ago was caused by the 
little craft bumping against a submerged hippopo- 
tamus. A steel ship, London built, steaming six 
knots ahead ; and grass huts, nude natives, and a 
hippopotamus — the ideas refuse to assort themselves, 
and one lives in a perpetual state of bewilderment 
and interrogation. 

It was a brilliant summer morning when the Ilala 



LAKES SHIR W 'A AND NY ASS A 41 

steamed into Lake Nyassa, and in a few hours we 
were at anchor in the little bay at Livingstonia. 
My first impressions of this famous mission-station 
certainly will never be forgotten. Magnificent 
mountains of granite, green to the summit with 
forest, encircled it, and on the silver sand of a still 
smaller bay stood the small row of trim white cottages. 
A neat path through a small garden led up to the 
settlement, and I approached the largest house and 
entered. It was the Livingstonia manse — the head 
missionary's house. It was spotlessly clean ; English 
furniture was in the room, a medicine chest, familiar- 
looking dishes were in the cupboards, books lying 
about, but there was no missionary in it. I went to 
the next house — it was the school, the benches were 
there and the blackboard, but there were no scholars 
and no teacher. I passed to the next, it was the 
blacksmith's shop ; there were the tools and the 
anvil, but there was no blacksmith. And so on to 
the next, and the next, all in perfect order, and all 
empty. Then a native approached and led me a few 
yards into the forest. And there among the mimosa 
trees, under a huge granite mountain, were four or 
five graves. These were the missionaries. 

I spent a day or two in the solemn shadow of 
that deserted manse. It is one of the loveliest spots 



\z THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

in the world ; and it was hard to believe, sitting 
under the tamarind trees by the quiet lake shore, 
that the pestilence which wasteth at midnight had 
made this beautiful spot its home. A hundred and 
fifty miles north, on the same lake-coast, the remnant 
of the missionaries have begun their task again, and 
there, slowly, against fearful odds, they are carrying 
on their work. Travellers have been pleased to say 
unkind things of missionaries. That they are some- 
times right, I will not question. But I will say of 
the Livingstonia missionaries, and of the Blantyre 
missionaries, and count it an honour to say it, that 
they are brave, efficient, single-hearted men, who 
need our sympathy more than we know, and are 
equally above our criticism and our praise. 

Malarial fever is the one sad certainty which every 
African traveller must face. For months he may 
escape, but its finger is upon him, and well for him 
if he has a friend near when it finally overtakes him. 
It is preceded for weeks, or even for a month or two, 
by unaccountable irritability, depression, and weari- 
ness. On the march with his men he has scarcely 
started when he sighs for the noon-day rest Putting 
it down to mere laziness, he goads himself on by 
draughts from the water-bottle, and totters forward a 
mile or two more. Next he finds himself skulking 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 43 

into the forest on the pretext of looking at a speci- 
men, and, when his porters are out of sight, throws 
himself under a tree in utter limpness and despair. 
Roused by mere shame, he staggers along the trail, 
and as he nears the mid-day camp puts on a spurt 
to conceal his defeat, which finishes him for the rest 
of the day. This is a good place for specimens he 
tells the men — the tent may be pitched for the night. 
This goes on day after day till the crash comes — 
first cold and pain, then heat and pain, then every 
kind of pain, and every degree of heat, then delirium, 
then the life- and -death struggle. He rises, if he 
does rise, a shadow ; and slowly accumulates strength 
for the next attack, which he knows too well will 
not disappoint him. No one has ever yet got to 
the bottom of African fever. Its geographical dis- 
tribution is still unmapped, but generally it- prevails 
over the whole east and west coasts within the 
tropical limit, along all the river -courses, on the 
shores of the inland lakes, and in all low-lying and 
marshy districts. The higher plateaux, presumably, 
are comparatively free from it, but in order to reach 
these, malarious districts of greater or smaller area 
have to be traversed. There the system becomes 
saturated with fever, which often develops long after 
the infected region is left behind. The known facts 



44 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

with regard to African fever are these : First, it is 
connected in some way with drying-up water and 
decaying vegetation, though how the germs develop, 
or what they are, is unknown. Second, natives 
suffer from fever equally with Europeans, and this 
more particularly in changing from district to district 
and from altitude to altitude. Thus, in marching 
over the Tanganyika plateau, four or five of my 
native carriers were down with fever, although their 
homes were only two or three hundred miles off, 
before I had even a touch of it. Third, quinine is 
the great and almost the sole remedy ; and fourth, 
no European ever escapes it 

The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a 
fact with which all who have any idea of casting in 
their lot with Africa should seriously reckon. None 
but those who have been on the spot, or have fol- 
lowed closely the inner history of African exploration 
and missionary work, can appreciate the gravity of 
the situation. The malaria spares no man ; the 
strong fall as the weak ; no number of precautions 
can provide against it ; no kind of care can do more 
than make the attacks less frequent ; no prediction 
can be made beforehand as to which regions are 
haunted by it and which are safe. It is not the 
least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the 



LAKES SHIRWA AND NY ASS A 45 

only known scientific test for it at present is a 
human life. That test has been applied in the 
Congo region already with a recklessness which the 
sober judgment can only characterise as criminal. 
It is a small matter that men should throw away 
their lives, in hundreds if need be, for a holy cause ; 
but it is not a small matter that man after man, in 
long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap 
what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has 
a duty in pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm 
can give any man a charmed life, and that those who 
work for the highest ends will best attain them in 
humble obedience to the common laws. Transcend- 
entally, this may be denied ; the warning finger may 
be despised as the hand of the coward and the 
profane. But the fact remains — the fact of an 
awful chain of English graves stretching across 
Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to dis- 
courage missionary enterprise. It is only said to 
regulate it. 

To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam 
yacht is quite a sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, 
and head-winds, and stopping to wood, and lying-to 
at nights, it takes longer time than going from 
England to America. The lake is begirt with 
mountains, and storms are so incessant and so 



46 THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

furious that Livingstone actually christened Nyassa 
the " Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring 
at night was generally so unpleasant that one pre- 
ferred then to be set on shore. My men — for I had 
already begun to pick up my caravan wherever I 
could find a native willing to go — would kindle fires 
all round to keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in 
peace upon the soft lake sand. 

Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, 
as first supposed, Lake Nyassa is now known to have 
a length of three hundred and fifty miles, and a 
breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It 
occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the 
profoundly deep water standing at a level of sixteen 
hundred feet above the sea, with the mountains rising 
all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to a 
height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet 
The mountains along the west coast form an almost 
unbroken chain, while the north-east and north are 
enclosed by the vast range of the Livingstone 
Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither 
so numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, 
but the //a/a has picked out some fair harbours on 
the west coast, and about half as many are already 
known on the east. 

I only visited one native village on the lake, and 



LAKES SH1RWA AND NYASSA 47 

\ should hope there are none others like it — indeed 
it was quite exceptional for Africa. I tumbled into 
it early one morning, out of the Ilalds dingy, and 
lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reek- 
ing huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met 
stricken men, at the acute stage of smallpox, 
wandering about the place at every turn, as if infec- 
tion were a thing unknown. The chief is the great- 
est slaver and the worst villain on the lake, and 
impaled upon poles all round his lodge, their ghastly 
faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted forty human 
heads. 

This village was not African, however. It was 
Arab. The native villages on Nyassa are rarely so 
large, seldom so compact, and never so dirty. Every- 
where they straggle along the shore and through the 
forest, and altogether there must be many hun- 
dreds of them scattered about the lake. On the 
western shore alone there are at least fifteen different 
tribes, speaking as many different languages, and 
each of them with dialects innumerable. 

The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawe, 
the present headquarters of the Scotch Livingstonia 
Mission. The phrase " headquarters of a mission " 
suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, 
with its overshadowing church ; a decent graveyard ; 



4* THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY 

and a reverent community in its Sunday clothes. 
But Bandawe is only a lodge or two in a vast 
wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the 
seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in 
bows and arrows. The said chapel, nevertheless, 
is as great an achievement in its way as Cologne 
Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much 
interested, and some of them at least to quite as 
much purpose. In reality no words can be a fit 
witness here to the impression made by Dr. Laws, 
Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular 
and apparently intractable material. A visit to Ban- 
dawe is a great moral lesson. And I cherish no 
more sacred memory of my life than that of a com- 
munion service in the little Bandawe* chapel, when 
the sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare 
black arm of a native communicant — a communi- 
cant whose life, tested afterwards in many an hour of 
trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him 
perhaps a better right to be there than any of us. 



Ill 

THE HEART OF AFRICA 

THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 



Ill 

THE HEART OF AFRICA 
THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 

TI 7E are now far enough into the interior to 
* ■ form some general idea of the aspect of the 
heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture any 
particular spot. The description about to be given 
applies generally to Shirwa, the Shire* Highlands, 
Nyassa, and the Nyassa - Tanganyika plateau — 
regions which together make up one of the great 
lobes of the heart of Africa. 

Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the 
reality than the idea of one's school days that the 
heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises from its 
three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the 
general physical geography of these has been already 
sketched — first, a coast-line, low and deadly ; farther 
in, a plateau the height of the Scottish Grampians ; 
farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country 



52 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. 
Now fill in this sketch, and you have Africa before 
you. Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, 
dot here and there a palm ; scatter through it a few 
demoralised villages ; and stock it with the leopard, 
the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. 
Clothe the mountainous plateaux next — both of 
them — with endless forest, — not grand umbrageous 
forest like the forests of South America, nor matted 
jungle like the forests of India, but with thin, rather 
weak forest, — with forest of low trees, whose half- 
grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from 
the tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees 
to the casual eye to remind you that you are in the 
tropics. Here and there one comes upon a borassus 
or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a mimosa 
aflame with colour, or a sepulchral baobab. A close 
inspection also will discover curious creepers and 
climbers ; and among the branches strange orchids 
hide their eccentric flowers. But the outward type 
of tree is the same as we have at home — trees 
resembling the ash, the beech, and the elm, only 
seldom so large, except by the streams, and never 
so beautiful. 1 Day after day you may wander 

1 The more important of these trees are — Napaca Kirkii, 
Brachystegia longifolia^ Vitex umbrosi, Erythrina sf>ea'osa 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 53 

through these forests with nothing except the climate 
to remind you where you are. The beasts, to be 
sure, are different, but unless you watch for them 
you will seldom see any ; the birds are different, but 
you rarely hear them ; and as for the rocks, they are 
our own familiar gneisses and granites, with honest 
basalt-dykes boring through them, and leopard-skin 
lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands 
and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, 
shadeless, trackless, voiceless — forest in mountain 
and forest in plain — this is East Central Africa. 

The indiscriminate praise formerly lavished on 
tropical vegetation has received many shocks from 
recent travellers. In Kaffirland, South Africa, I have 
seen one or two forests fine enough to justify the en- 
thusiasm of armchair word-painters of the tropics ; but 
so far as the central plateau is concerned, the careful 
judgment of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the 
equatorial belt in general — a judgment which has at 
once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands, 
and made imaginative people more content to stay at 
home — applies almost to this whole area. The fairy 
labyrinth of ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing 
plants blocking the paths and scenting the forests 

Ficus sycamorus, Khaya senegalensis, Nuxia congests Pari- 
narium mobola^ and Erythrophloeum guineensis 



54 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of 
insects, the gaily-plumaged birds, the paroquets, the 
monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded 
bowers — these are unknown to Africa. Once a 
week you will see a palm ; once in three months the 
monkey will cross your path ; the flowers on the 
whole are few ; the trees are poor ; and to be honest, 
though the endless forest -clad mountains have a 
sublimity of their own, and though there are tropical 
bits along some of the mountain-streams of exquisite 
beauty, nowhere is there anything in grace and 
sweetness and strength to compare with a Highland 
glen. For the most part of the year these forests 
are jaded and sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or 
alchemylla or scented woodruff, the bare trunks fres- 
coed with few lichens, their motionless and unre- 
freshed leaves drooping sullenly from their sapless 
boughs. Flowers there are, small and great, in end- 
less variety ; but there is no display of flowers, no 
gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as when the 
blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The 
dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has per- 
haps something to do with this want of colour-effect 
in tropical nature ; for there is always about ten 
minutes just after sunset, when the whole tone of the 
landscape changes like magic, and a singular beauty 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 55 

steals over the scene. This is the sweetest moment 
of the African day, and night hides only too swiftly 
the homelike softness and repose so strangely grateful 
to the over-stimulated eye. 

Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' 
nests in a wood, in terror of one another, and of 
their common foe, the slaver, are small native 
villages ; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells 
primeval man, without clothes, without civilisation, 
without learning, without religion — the genuine child 
of nature, thoughtless, careless, and contented. This 
man is apparently quite happy ; he has practically 
no wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear ; 
two sticks rubbed together make him a fire ; fifty 
sticks tied together make him a house. The bark 
he peels from them makes his clothes ; the fruits 
which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly 
astonishing when one thinks of it what nature can 
do for the animal-man, to see with what small capital 
after all a human being can get through the world. 
I once saw an African buried. According to the 
custom of his tribe, his entire earthly possessions — 
and he was an average commoner — were buried with 
him. Into the grave, after the body, was lowered 
the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud 
bowl, and last his bow and arrows — -the bowstring 



56 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

cut through the middle, a touching symbol that its 
work was done. This was all. Four items, as an 
auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for 
half a century of this human being. No man knows 
what a man is till he has seen what a man can be 
without, and be withal a man. That is to say, no 
man knows how great man is till he has seen how 
small he has been once. 

The African is often blamed for being lazy, but 
it is a misuse of words. He does not need to work ; 
with so bountiful a nature round him it would be 
gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as 
it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his 
flat nose, and as little blameworthy as slowness in 
a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is a nation of the 
unemployed. 

This completeness, however, will be a sad draw- 
back to development. Already it is found difficult 
to create new wants ; and when labour is required, 
and you have already paid your man a yard of calico 
and a string of beads, you have nothing in your 
possession to bribe him to another hand's turn. 
Nothing almost that you have would be the slightest 
use to him. Among the presents which I took for 
chiefs, I was innocent enough to include a watch. I 
might as well have taken a grand piano. For 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 57 

months I never looked at my own watch in that 
land of sunshine. Besides, the mere idea of time has 
scarcely yet penetrated the African mind, and forms 
no element whatever in his calculations. I wanted 
on one occasion to catch the little steamer on the 
Shir£, and pleaded this as an excuse to a rather 
powerful chief, whom it would have been dangerous 
to quarrel with, and who would not let me leave his 
village. The man merely stared. The idea of any 
one being in a hurry was not only preposterous but 
inconceivable, and I might as well have urged as 
my reason for wishing away that the angles of a 
triangle are equal to two right angles. 

This difference in ideas is the real obstacle to 
African travelling, and it raises all sorts of problems 
in one's mind as to the nature of ideas themselves. 
I often wished I could get inside an African for an 
afternoon, and just see how he looked at things ; for 
I am sure our worlds are as different as the colour of 
our skins. 

Talking of skins, I may observe in passing that 
the highland African is not a negro, nor is his skin 
black. It is a deep full-toned brown, something like 
the colour of a good cigar. The whole surface is 
diced with a delicate pattern, which gives it great 
richness and beauty, and I often thought how effect- 



58 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

ive a row of books would be bound in native- 
morocco. 

No one knows exactly who these people are 
They belong, of course, to the great Bantu race ; but 
their origin is obscure, their tribal boundaries are 
unmapped, even their names are unknown, and their 
languages — for there are many — are unintelligible. 
A fine-looking people, quiet and domestic, their life- 
history from the cradle to the grave is of the utmost 
simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt, they live all but 
exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the 
year they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits 
and herbs ; but the staple food is a small tasteless 
millet-seed which they grow in gardens, crush in a 
mortar, and stir with water into a thick porridge. 
Twice a day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs 
himself with this coarse and tasteless dough, shovel- 
ling it into his mouth in handfuls, and consuming 
at a sitting a pile the size of an ant-heap. His one 
occupation is to grow this millet, and his gardening 
is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the forest, he 
climbs a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops 
off the branches one by one. He then wades 
through the litter to the next tree, and hacks it to 
pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect Upon 
all the trees within a circle of thirty or forty yards 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 59 

diameter his axe works similar havoc, till the ground 
stands breast-high in leaves and branches. Next, 
the whole is set on fire and burnt to ashes. Then, 
when the first rains moisten the hard ground and 
wash the fertile chemical constituents of the ash into 
the soil, he attacks it with his hoe, drops in a few 
handfuls of millet, and the year's work is over. But 
a few weeks off and on are required for these opera- 
tions, and he may then go to sleep till the rains are 
over, assured of a crop which never fails, which is 
never poor, and which will last him till the rains 
return again. 

Between the acts he does nothing but lounge 
and sleep ; his wife, or wives, are the millers and 
bakers ; they work hard to prepare his food, and are 
rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, 
for no African would ever demean himself by eating 
with a woman. I have tried to think of something 
else that these people habitually do, but their vacuous 
life leaves nothing more to tell. 

Apart from eating, their sole occupation is to 
talk, and this they do unceasingly, emphasising their 
words with a marvellous wealth of gesticulation. 
Talking, indeed, is an art here — the art it must once 
have been in Europe before the newspaper drove 
it out of fashion. The native voices are sometimes 



60 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

highly musical, though in the strict sense the people 
have no notion whatever of singing ; and the lan- 
guages themselves are full of melody. Every word, 
like the Italian, ends in a vowel, and when well 
spoken they are exceedingly effective and full of 
character. 

Notwithstanding their rudimentary estate, the 
people of Africa have the beginnings of all the more 
characteristic things that make up the life of civilised 
man. They have a national amusement, the dance ; 
a national musical instrument, the drum ; a national 
drink, pombi ; a national religion, the fear of evil 
spirits. Their chamber of justice is a council of 
head-men or chiefs ; their court of appeal the muavi, 
or poison-cup. No new thing is found here that is 
not in some form in modern civilisation ; no new 
thing in civilisation but has its embryo and prophecy 
in the simpler life of these primitive tribes. To the 
ignorant these men are animals ; but the eye of 
evolution looks on them with a kindlier and more 
instructed sense. They are what we were once ; 
possibly they may become what we are now. 

What, then, is to become of this strange people 
and their land ? With the glowing figures of a very 
distinguished traveller in our minds, are we to expect 
that the Shire and Congo routes have but to be con- 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 61 

nected with New York and Manchester to cause at 
once a revolution among the people of Africa and in 
the commerce of the world ? We hear two criticisms 
upon that subject. One complains that while Mr. 
Stanley emphasises in the most convincing way the 
thousands of miles of cloth the African is waiting to 
receive from Europe, he is all but silent as to what 
Europe is to get in return. A second remark is 
that Africa has nothing to give in return, and never 
will have. 

The facts of the case briefly, as it seems to me, 
are these : — 

First, The only thing of value the interior of 
Africa produces at present in any quantity is ivory. 
There is still, undoubtedly, a supply of this precious 
material in the country- — a supply which may last 
yet for fifteen or twenty years. But it is well to 
frame future calculation on the certainty of this 
abnormal source of wealth ceasing, as it must do, in 
the immediate future. 

Second, Africa already produces in a wild state 
a number of vegetable and other products of con- 
siderable commercial value ; and although the soil 
can only be said to be of average fertility, there is 
practically no limit to the extent to which these 
could be developed. 









62 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

Wild indigo — the true indigofera tinctoria — is 
already growing on the hills of the interior. The 
Londolphia, an indiarubber -bearing creeper, is to 
be seen on most of the watercourses ; and a variety 
of the Ficus elastica, the well-known rubber plant, 
abounds on Lake Nyassa. The orchilla weed is 
common. The castor -oil plant, ginger, and other 
spices, the tobacco-plant, the cotton-plant, and many 
fibre-yielding grasses, are also found ; and oil-seeds 
of every variety and in endless quantity are grown 
by the natives for local use. 

The fatal drawback, meantime, to the further 
development of these comparatively invaluable pro- 
ducts is the transit, carriage to the coast from Nyassa 
or Tanganyika being almost prohibitive. Up till 
very recently only two native products have ever 
been exported from this region — indiarubber and 
beeswax, and these in but trifling quantity. But 
there is no reason why these products should not be 
largely developed, and freights must become lower 
and lower every year. In addition to the plants 
named, the soil of Central Africa is undoubtedly 
adapted for growing coffee ; and the Cinchona would 
probably flourish well on the higher grounds of the 
Tanganyika plateau. 

I must not omit to mention in this connection 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 63 

that an attempt is now being made, and so far with 
marked success, to form actual plantations in the 
interior of Africa ; and the result of the experiment 
ought to be watched with exceptional interest. Mr. 
Moir, on behalf of the African Lakes Company, and 
the Brothers Buchanan on their own account, and 
also Mr. Scott, with remarkable industry and enter- 
prise have each formed at Blantyre a coffee planta- 
tion of considerable size. The plants, when I saw 
them, were still young, but very healthy and promis- 
ing, and already a first crop of fine coffee-berries 
hung from the trees, and has since been marketed. 
These same gentlemen have also grown heavy crops 
of wheat ; and Mr. Buchanan has succeeded well 
with sugar-cane, potatoes and other English vege- 
tables. The manual work here has been entirely 
done by natives ; and an immense saving to resident 
Europeans will be effected when the interior is able 
to provide its own food supplies, for at present wheat, 
coffee, and sugar, have all to be imported from home. 

With so satisfactory an account of the possibilities 
of the country, the only question that remains is this 
— Can the African native really be taught to work ? 

This question I answer unhesitatingly in the 
affirmative. I have described Africa as a nation of 
the unemployed. But the sole reason for the current 



THE HEART OF AFRICA 



impression that the African is an incorrigible idler is 
that at present there is really nothing for him to do. 
But that he can work and will work when the 
opportunity and inducement offer has been proved 
by experiment. The coast native, as all must 
testify who have seen him in the harbour of Zanzibar, 
Mozambique, Delagoa Bay, Natal, or the other eastern 
ports, is, with all allowances, a splendid worker ; and 
though the experiment has seldom been tried in the 
interior, it is well known that the capacity is there, 
and wherever encouraged yields results beyond all 
expectation. Probably the severest test to which 
the native of Central Africa has ever been put is the 
construction of the Stevenson road, between Lakes 
Nyassa and Tanganyika. Forty -six miles of that 
road — probably the only thing of the kind in Central 
Africa — have already been made entirely by native 
labour, and the work could not have been better 
done had it been executed by English navvies. I 
have watched by the day a party of seventy natives 
working at a cutting upon that road. Till three or 
four years ago none of them had ever looked upon 
a white man ; nor, till a few months previously, had 
one of them seen a spade, a pickaxe, or a crowbar. 
Yet these savages handled their tools to such purpose 
that, with only a single European superintendent, they 



THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE 65 

have made a road, full of difficult cuttings and 
gradients, which would not disgrace a railway con- 
tractor at home. The workmen keep regular hours 
— six in the morning till five at night, with a rest at 
mid-day — work steadily, continuously, willingly, and 
above all, merrily. This goes on, observe, in the heart 
of the tropics, almost under the equator itself, where 
the white man's energy evaporates, and leaves him 
so limp that he cannot even be an example to his 
men. This goes on too without any compulsion ; the 
natives flock from far and near, sometimes from long 
distances, to try this new sensation of work. These 
men are not slaves, but volunteers ; and though 
they are paid by the fortnight, many will remain at 
their post the whole season through. The only bribe 
for all this work is a yard or two of calico per week 
per man ; so that it seems to me one of the greatest 
problems of the future of Africa is here solved. In 
capacity the African is fit to work, in inclination he 
is willing to work, and in actual experiment he has 
done it ; so that with capital enlisted and wise heads 
to direct these energies, with considerate employers 
who will remember that these men are but children, 
this vast nation of the unemployed may yet be added 
to the slowly growing list of the world's producers. 
Africa at this moment has an impossible access, a 
F 



66 THE HEART OF AFRICA 

perilous climate, a penniless people, an undeveloped 
soil. So once had England. It may never be done ; 
other laws may operate, unforeseen factors may inter- 
fere ; but there is nothing in the soil, the products, 
the climate, or the people of Africa to forbid its 
joining even at this late day in the great march of 
civilisation. 



IV 

THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 



IV 

THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 

r I V HE life of the native African is not all idyll. It 
■*- is darkened by a tragedy whose terrors are 
unknown to any other people under heaven. Of its 
mild domestic slavery I do not speak, nor of its 
revolting witchcraft, nor of its endless quarrels and 
frequent tribal wars. These minor evils are lost in 
the shadow of a great and national wrong. Among 
these simple and unprotected tribes, Arabs — uninvited 
strangers of another race and nature — pour in from 
the North and East, with the deliberate purpose of 
making this paradise a hell. It seems the awful 
destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives 
in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they 
go in Africa the followers of Islam are the destroyers 
of peace, the breakers up of the patriarchal life, the 
dissolvers of the family tie. Already they hold the 



70 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

whole Continent under one reign of terror. They 
have effected this in virtue of one thing — they 
possess firearms ; and they do it for one object — 
ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The slaves 
are needed to buy ivory with ; then more slaves have 
to be stolen to carry it. So living man himself has 
become the commercial currency of Africa. He is 
locomotive, he is easily acquired, he is immediately 
negotiable. 

Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale 
trade in this terrible commodity are now established 
all over the heart of Africa. They are usually con- 
nected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and 
other places on the coast, and communication is 
kept up by caravans which pass, at long intervals, 
from one to the other. Being always large and well 
supplied with the material of war, these caravans 
have at their mercy the feeble and divided native 
tribes through which they pass, and their trail across 
the Continent is darkened with every aggravation 
of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene 
suddenly ; they stay only long enough to secure 
their end, and disappear only to return when a new 
crop has arisen which is worth the reaping. 

Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle 
for a year or two in the heart of some quiet com- 



jts pathology and cure 



munity in the remote interidr. They pretend perfect 
friendship ; they molest no one ; they barter honestly. 
They plant the seeds of their favourite vegetables 
and fruits — the Arab always carries seeds with him 
— as if they meant to stay for ever. Meantime they 
buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of it are 
buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods 
are gone. Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable 
quarrel is picked. And then follows a wholesale 
massacre. Enough only arelspared from the slaughter 
to carry the ivory to the coast ; the grass-huts of 
the village are set on fire ; the Arabs strike camp ; 
and the slave-march, worse than death, begins. 

This last act in the drama, the slave-march, is 
the aspect of slavery which, in the past, has chiefly 
aroused the passions and the sympathy of the outside 
world, but the greater evil is the demoralisation and 
disintegration of communities by which it is neces- 
sarily preceded. It is essential to the traffic that the 
region drained by the slaver should be kept in per- 
petual political ferment ; that, in order to prevent 
combination, chief should be pitted against chief; 
and that the moment any tribe threatened to assume 
a dominating strength it should either be broken up 
by the instigation of rebellion among its dependencies, 
or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation 



72 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

of tribe with tribe is so intricate that it is impossible 
to exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium 
at even a single centre. But, like a river, a slave- 
caravan has to be fed by innumerable tributaries all 
along its course — at first in order to gather a suffi- 
cient volume of human bodies for the start, and 
afterwards to replace the frightful loss by desertion, 
disablement, and death. The Slave-Map, appended 
by courteous permission of Mr. James Stevenson, 
will give some idea of the extent of country cursed 
and blighted to keep up this traffic. 

Many at home imagine that the death-knell of 
slavery was struck with the events which followed 
the death of Livingstone. In the great explorer's 
time we heard much of slavery ; we were often 
appealed to ; the Government busied itself ; some- 
thing was really done. But the wail is already for- 
gotten, and England hears little now of the open 
sore of the world. But the tragedy I have alluded 
to is repeated every year and every month — witness 
such recent atrocities as those of the Upper Congo, 
the Kassai and Sankaru region described by Wiss- 
mann, of the Welle- Inakua district referred to by 
Van Gele. It was but yesterday that an explorer, 
crossing from Lake Nyassa to Lake Tanganyika, 
saw the whole southern end of Tanganyika peopled 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 73 

with large and prosperous villages. The next to 
follow him found not a solitary human being — 
nothing but burned homes and bleaching skeletons. 
It was but yesterday — the close of 1887 — that the 
Arabs at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after 
destroying fourteen villages with many of their 
inhabitants, pursued the population of one village 
into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, sur- 
rounded it, and slew with the bullet and the spear 
those who crawled out from the more merciful flames. 
The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people be- 
longed, were, until this event, one of the most pros- 
perous tribes in East Central Africa. They occupied 
a country of exceptional fertility and beauty. Three 
rivers, which never failed in the severest drought, 
run through their territory, and their crops were the 
richest and most varied in the country. ' They 
possessed herds of cattle and goats ; they fished in 
the lake with nets ; they wrought iron into many- 
patterned spear -heads with exceptional ingenuity 
and skill ; and that even artistic taste had begun to 
develop among them was evident from the orna- 
mental work upon their huts, which were them- 
selves unique in Africa for clever construction and 
beauty of design. This people, in short, by their 
own inherent ability and the natural resources of 



74 THE HEART-DISEASE OP AFRICA 

their country, were on the high road to civilisation 
Now mark the swift stages in their decline and fall. 
Years ago an almost unnoticed rill from that great 
Arab stream, which with noiseless current and ever- 
changing bed has never ceased to flow through 
Africa, trickled into the country. At first the Arab 
was there on sufferance ; he paid his way. Land 
was bought from the Wa-Nkonde chiefs, and their 
sovereignty acknowledged. The Arab force grew. 
In time it developed into a powerful incursion, and 
the Arabs began openly to assert themselves. One 
of their own number was elevated to the rulership, 
with the title of " Sultan of Nkonde." The tension 
became great, and finally too severe to last. After 
innumerable petty fights the final catastrophe was 
hurried on, and after an atrocious carnage the rem- 
nant of the Wa-Nkonde were driven from their 
fatherland. Such is the very last chapter in the 
history of Arab rule in Africa. 

The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the 
Portuguese, are crying out at present for territory in 
Central Africa. Meantime humanity is crying out 
for some one to administer the country ; for some one 
to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a 
map with coloured crayons, but by seeing justice 
done upon the spot ; for some one with a strong arm 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 75 

and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke and keep 
these unprotected children free. It has been reserved 
for a small company of English gentlemen to arrest 
the hand of the raider in the episode I have just 
described. While Germany covets Nyassa-land, 
while Portugal claims it, while England has sent a 
consul there, without protection, to safeguard British 
missionary and trading interests, two agents of the 
African Lakes Company, two missionaries, the 
British Consul at Mozambique, with two com- 
panions who happened to be in Nyassa-land on 
scientific work, have, at the risk of their lives, 
averted further war, and with their own rifles 
avenged the crime. 

But this fortuitous concourse of English rifles 
cannot be reckoned upon every day ; nor is it the 
part of the missionary and the trader to play the 
game of war. The one thing needed for Africa at 
present is some system of organised protection to 
the native, and the decisive breaking of the Arab 
influence throughout the whole interior. These 
events at Lake Nyassa have brought this subject 
once more before the civilised world, and I may 
briefly state the situation as it at present stands. 

Five years ago the British cruisers which had 
been for years engaged in suppressing the slave-trade 



76 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

were tempted to relax their efforts. They had 
done splendid service. The very sight of the great 
hull of the Lo'ridon, as she rocked in the harbour of 
Zanzibar, had a pacific influence ; and as the cara- 
vans from the interior came and went at intervals of 
years and found the cruisers' cannon still pointing to 
their sultan's palace, they carried the fear of England 
over the length and breadth of Africa. The slave- 
trade was seriously discouraged, and, so far as the 
coast traffic was concerned, it was all but completely 
arrested. What work, up to this point, was done, 
was well done ; but, after all, only half the task had 
ever been attempted. It was not enough to stop 
the sewer at its mouth ; its sources in the heart of 
Africa should have been sought out and purified. 
But now that even the menace at Zanzibar no 
longer threatened the slavers, their work was resumed 
with redoubled energy. The withdrawal of the 
London was interpreted to mean either that England 
conceived her work to be done or that she had 
grown apathetic and would interfere no more. 

The consequences were almost immediately dis- 
astrous. A new license to devastate, to murder, and 
to enslave, was telegraphed all over Africa, and 
speedily found expression, in widely-separated parts 
of the country, in horrors the details of which can 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 77 

never be known to the civilised world. The dis- 
turbances on Lake Nyassa undoubtedly belong, 
though indirectly, to this new category of crime. 
Already the Arabs have learned that there is no one 
now to take them to task. In one district after 
another they have played their game and won ; and 
with ample power, with absolute immunity from 
retribution, and with the sudden creation of a new 
demand for slaves in a quarter of which I dare not 
speak further here, their offences can only increase in 
number and audacity. It is remarkable in the Wa- 
Nkonde episode that, for the first time probably in 
Central Africa, the Mohammedan defiance to the 
Christian power was open and undisguised. Hitherto 
the Arab worked in secret. The mere presence of 
a white man in the country was sufficient to stay his 
hand. On this occasion the Arab not only did not 
conceal his doings from the Europeans, nor flee 
when he was remonstrated with, but turned and 
attacked his monitors. The political significance of 
this is plain. It is part of a policy. It is a challenge 
to Europe from the whole Mohammedan power. 
Europe in Africa is divided ; Mohammedanism is 
one. No isolated band of Arabs would have ven- 
tured upon such a line of action unless they were 
perfectly sure of their ground. Nor is there any 



78 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

reason why they should not be sure of their ground. 
Europe is talking much about Africa ; it is doing 
nothing This the Arab has discerned. It is one 
of the most astounding facts in morals that England 
should have kept the Arab at bay so long. But the 
time of probation is over. And the plain issue is 
now before the world — Is the Arab or the European 
henceforth to reign in Africa ? 

How the European could reign In Africa is a 
simple problem. The real difficulty is as to who in 
Europe will do it. Africa is claimed by everybody, 
and it belongs to nobody. So far as the Nyassa 
region is concerned, while the Portuguese assert their 
right to the south and west, scarcely one of them has 
ever set foot in it ; and while the Germans claim the 
north and east, their pretension is based neither upon 
right of discovery, right of treaty, right of purchase, 
right of conquest, nor right of possession, but on the 
cool audacity of some chartographer in Berlin, who, 
in delimiting a tract of country recognised as Ger- 
man by the London Convention of 1886, allowed 
his paint-brush to colour some tens of thousands of 
square miles beyond the latitude assigned. To 
England it is a small matter politically who gets 
Africa. But it is of moment that those who secure 
the glory of annexation should not evade the duty 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 79 

of administration. The present condition of Africa 
is too critical to permit so wholesale a system of 
absentee landlordism ; and it is the duty of England, 
so far at least as the Nyassa region is concerned, 
to insist on the various claimants either being true 
to their assumed responsibilities or abandoning a 
nominal sovereignty. 

, It is well known, — it is certain, — that neither 
Portugal nor Germany will ever administer this 
region. If they would, the problem would be solved, 
and England would gladly welcome the release ; the 
release, for, although England has never aided this 
country with a force of arms, she has for some time 
known that in some way, direct or indirect, she 
ought to do it. This country is in a special sense 
the protege of England. Since Livingstone's death 
the burden of it has never really left her conscience. 
The past relation of England to Nyassa-land, and 
her duty now, will be apparent from the following 
simple facts : — 

Lake Nyassa was discovered by David Living- 
stone. At the time he was acting as Her Majesty's 
Consul, and was sent to Africa with a Government 
Expedition, which was equipped not to perform an 
exceptional and romantic piece of work, but in 
accordance with a settled policy on the part of 



8o THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

England. " The main object of the Zambesi Expe- 
dition," says Livingstone, " as our instructions from 
Her Majesty's Government explicitly stated, was to 
extend the knowledge already attained of the geo- 
graphy, and mineral and agricultural resources, of 
Eastern and Central Africa ; to improve our acquaint- 
ance with the inhabitants, and to endeavour to 
engage them to apply themselves to industrial 
pursuits, and to the cultivation of their lands, with a 
view to the production of raw material to. be exported 
to England in return for British manufactures ; and 
it was hoped that, by encouraging the natives to 
occupy themselves in the development of the resources 
of the country, a considerable advance might be 
made towards the extinction of the slave-trade, as 
they would not be long in discovering that the 
former would eventually be a more certain source 
of profit than the latter. The Expedition was sent 
in accordance with the settled policy of tJie English 
Government ; and the Earl of Clarendon being then 
at the head of the Foreign Office, the Mission was 
organised under his immediate care. When a 
change of Government ensued we experienced the 
same generous countenance and sympathy from the 
Earl of Malmesbury as we had previously received 
from Lord Clarendon ; and on the accession of Earl 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 



Russell to the high office he has so long filled we 
were always favoured with equally ready attention 
and the same prompt assistance. Thus the conviction 
was produced that our work embodied the principles 
not of any one party, but of the hearts of the statesmen 
and of the people of England generally? 

Encouraged by this national interest in Africa, 
the churches of England and Scotland attempted to 
follow up the work of Livingstone in one at least of 
its aspects, by sending missionaries into the country. 
These have already succeeded in establishing them- 
selves in one district after another, and are daily 
extending in numbers and influence. 

In order to perpetuate a scarcely less important 
branch of the movement initiated by Livingstone, 
— a department specially sanctioned, as the above 
extract shows, by the English Government — the 
African Lakes Company was formed in 1878. Its 
object was to open up and develop the regions of 
East Central Africa from the Zambesi to Tangan- 
yika ; to make employments for the native peoples, 
to trade with them honestly, to keep out rum, and, 
so far as possible, gunpowder and firearms, and to 
co-operate and strengthen the hands of the mis- 
sionary. It has already established twelve trading 
stations, manned by a staff of twenty-five Europeans 



82 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

and many native agents. The Ilala on Lake Nyassa 
belongs to it ; and it has just placed a new steamer 
to supersede the Lady Nyassa on the river Shire\ 
It has succeeded in starting a flourishing coffee 
plantation in the interior, and new sources of wealth 
are being gradually introduced. For the first time, 
on the large scale, it has taught the natives the 
meaning and the blessings of work. It has acted, 
to some extent, as a check upon the slave-trade ; it 
has prevented inter-tribal strife, and helped to protect 
the missionaries in time of war. The African Lakes 
Company, in short, modest as is the scale on which 
it works, and necessarily limited as are its oppor- 
tunities, has been for years the sole administering 
hand in this part of Africa. This Company does 
not exist for gain ; — or exists for gain only in the 
sense that commercial soundness is the only solid 
basis on which to build up an institution which can 
permanently benefit others. A large amount of 
private capital has been expended by this Company ; 
yet, during all the years it has carried on its noble 
enterprise, it has re-invested in Africa all that it has 
taken from it 

All this British capital, all the capital of the 
Missions, all these various and not inconsiderable 
agencies, have been tempted into Africa largely in 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 83 

the hope that the old policy of England would not 
only be continued but extended. England has never 
in theory departed from the position she assumed 
in the days of the Zambesi Expedition. On the 
contrary, she has distinctly recognised the relation 
between her Government and Africa. She has con- 
tinued to send out British Consuls to be the succes- 
sors of Livingstone in the Nyassa region. When 
the first of these, Captain Foote, R.N., died in the 
Shire* Highlands in 1884, the English Government 
immediately sent another to take his place. But 
this is the last thing that has been done. The Con- 
sul is there as a protest that England has still her 
eye on Africa. But Africa needs more than an eye. 
And when, as happened the other day, one of Her 
Majesty's representatives was under Arab fire for 
five days and nights on the shores of Lake Nyassa, 
this was brought home to us in such practical fashion 
as to lead to the hope that some practical measures 
will now be taken. 

I do not presume to bring forward a formal pro- 
posal ; but two things occur to one as feasible, and 
I shall simply name them. The first is for England, 
or Germany, or France, or some one with power and 
earnestness, to take a firm and uncompromising 
stand at Zanzibar. Zanzibar, as the Arab capital, is 



84 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

one of the keys of the situation, and any lesson 
taught here would be learned presently by the whole 
Mohammedan following in the country. 

The other key to the situation is the vast and 
splendid water-way in the heart of Africa — the 
Upper Shire, Lake Nyassa, Lake Tanganyika, and 
the Great Lakes generally. As a base for military 
or patrol operations nothing better could be desired 
than these great inland seas. A small steamer upon 
each of them — or, to begin with, upon Nyassa and 
Tanganyika — with an associated depot or two of 
armed men on the higher and healthier plateaux 
which surround them, would keep the whole country 
quiet. Only a trifling force of well -drilled men 
would be needed for this purpose. They might be 
whites, or blacks and whites ; they might be Sikhs 
or Pathans from India ; and the expense is not to 
be named considering the magnitude of the results 
— the pacification of the entire equatorial region — 
that would be achieved. That expense could be 
borne by the Missions, but it is not their province 
to employ the use of force ; it could be borne by the 
Lakes Company, only they deserve protection from 
others rather than that this should be added to the 
large debt civilisation already owes them ; it could 
be done by the Free Congo State, — and if no one 



ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE 85 

else is shamed into doing it, this further labour of 
love may fall into its hands. But whether alone, 
or in co-operation with the few and overburdened 
capitalists of the country, or in conjunction with 
foreign powers, England will be looked to to take 
the initiative with this or a similar scheme. 

The barriers in the way of Government action 
are only two, and neither is insurmountable. The 
one is Portugal, which owns the approaches to the 
country ; the other is Germany, which has inland 
interests of her own. Whether England could pro- 
ceed in the face of these two powers would simply 
depend on how it was done. As a mere political 
move such an occupation of the interior might at 
once excite alarm and jealousy. But wearing the 
aspect of a serious mission for the good of Africa, 
instigated not by the Foreign Office but by the 
people of England, it is impossible to believe that 
the step could either be misunderstood or opposed. 
It is time the nations looked upon Africa as some- 
thing more than a chessboard. And even if it were 
but a chessboard, the players on every hand are wise 
enough to know that whatever is honestly done to 
relieve this suffering continent will react in a 
hundred ways upon the interests of all who hold 
territorial rights within it. 



86 THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA 

A beginning once made, one might not be unduly 
sanguine in anticipating that the meshes of a pacific 
and civilising influence would rapidly spread through- 
out the country. Already the missionaries are 
pioneering everywhere, prepared to stay and do 
their part ; and asking no more from the rest of the 
world than a reasonable guarantee that they should 
be allowed to live. Already the trading companies 
are there, from every nationality, and in every 
direction ready to open up the country, but unable 
to go on with any confidence or enthusiasm till their 
isolated interests are linked together and secured in 
the presence of a common foe. The territories of the 
various colonies are slowly converging upon the heart 
of Africa, and to unite them in an informal defensive 
alliance would not be impossible. With Emin Pasha 
occupying the field in the north ; with the African 
Lakes Company, the British East African Association, 
and the German Association, in the east ; with the 
Congo Free State in the west, and British Bechuana- 
land in the south, a cordon is already thrown around 
the Great Lakes region, which requires only to have 
its several parts connected with one another and 
with central forces on the Lakes, to secure the peace 
of Africa. 



V 

WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA- 
TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 

A TRAVELLER'S DIARY 



WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA 
TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 

A TRAVELLER'S DIARY 

\ T TITH a glade in the forest for a study, a bale 
• * of calico for a table, and the sun vertical 
and something under a billion centigrade, diary- 
writing in the tropics is more picturesque than 
inspiring. To keep a journal, however, next to 
keeping his scalp, is the one thing for which the 
consistent traveller will go through fire and water ; 
and the dusky native who carries the faded note- 
books on the march is taught to regard the sacred- 
ness of his office more than if he drove the car of 
Juggernaut. The contents of these mysterious note- 
books, nevertheless, however precious to those who 
write them, are, like the photographs of one's rela- 
tions, of pallid interest to others, and I have there- 
fore conscientiously denied myself the joy of exhibit- 



90 WANDERINGS ON THE 

ing such offspring of the wilderness as I possess to 
my confiding reader. 

But as the diary form has advantages of its own, 
I make no apology at this stage for transcribing and 
editing a few rough pages. Better, perhaps, than by 
a more ordered narrative, they may help others to 
enter into the traveller's life, and to illustrate what 
the African traveller sees and hears and does. I 
shall disregard names, and consecutive dates, and 
routes. My object is simply to convey some 
impression of how the world wags in a land 
unstirred by civilisation, and all but untouched by 
time. 

2Qth September. — Left Karongas, at the north 
end of Lake Nyassa, at 10.30, with a mongrel 
retinue of seven Mandalla natives, twelve Bandawe" 
Atongas, six Chingus, and my three faithfuls — Jingo, 
Moolu, and Seyid. Total twenty-eight. Not one 
of my men could speak a word of English. They 
belonged to three different tribes and spoke as many 
languages ; the majority, however, knew something 
of Chinanja, the lake language, of which I had also 
learned a little, so we soon understood one another. 
It is always a wise arrangement to have different 
tribes in a caravan, for in the event of a strike, and 
there are always strikes, there is less chance of con- 



NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 9* 

certed action. Each man carried on his head a 
portion of my purse — which in this region consists 
solely of cloth and beads ; while one or two of the 
more dependable were honoured with the trans- 
portation of the tent, collecting-boxes, provisions, 
and guns. 

The road struck into a banana grove, then 
through a flat country fairly well wooded with a 
variety of trees, including many palms and a few 
baobabs. The native huts dotted over this rich 
flat are the best I have seen in Africa. The roofs 
are trimly thatched, and a rude carving adorns door- 
post and lintel. After seven miles the Rukuru is 
crossed — a fine stream rippling over the sand, with 
large flakes of mica tumbling about in the current, 
and sampling the rocks of the distant hills. The 
men laid down their loads, and sprawled about like 
crocodiles in the water as I waded across. A few 
yards off is a village, where a fire was quickly lit, 
and the entire population turned out to watch the 
white man nibble his lunch. The consumption at 
this meal being somewhat slight, and the menu 
strange to my audience, I saw that they regarded 
the white man's effort at nutrition with feelings of 
contempt. " The M'sungu eats nothing," whispered 
one, " he must die." The head man presently came 



92 WANDERINGS ON THE 

asking beads ; but, as I had none unpacked, two 
stray trinkets and a spoonful of salt more than 
satisfied him. On getting the salt he deftly twisted 
a leaf into a little bag, and after pouring all the salt 
into it, graciously held out his hand to a troop of 
small boys who crowded round, and received one lick 
each of his empty palm. Salt is perhaps the great- 
est luxury and the greatest rarity the north -end 
African can have, and the avidity with which these 
young rascals received their homoeopathic allowance 
proved the instinctiveness of the want. I have often 
offered native boys the choice between a pinch of 
salt and a knot of sugar, and they never failed to 
choose the first. For return-present the chief made 
over to me two large gourds filled with curds, of 
which, of course, I pretended to drink deeply before 
passing it on to the men. 

Three miles of the same country, with tall bean- 
plants about, castor oil, and maize, but no villages 
in sight. Bananas unusually fine, and Borassus 
everywhere. At the tenth or eleventh mile we 
reached the fringe of hills bordering the higher 
lands, and, taking advantage of a passage about 
half a mile wide which has been cut by the river, 
penetrated the first barrier — a low rounded hill of 
conglomerate, fine in texture, and of a dark -red 



NYASSA-TANGANY1KA PLATEAU 93 

colour. Flanking this for two miles, we entered a 
broad oval expansion among the hills, the site 
apparently of a former lake. Winding along with 
the river for a mile or two more, and passing through 
a narrow and romantic glen, we emerged in a second 
valley, and camped for the night on the banks of 
the stream. On the opposite side stood a few native 
huts, and the occupants, after much reconnoitring, 
were induced to exchange some ufa and sweet 
potatoes for a little cloth. 

\st October. — Moolu peered into my tent with 
the streak of dawn to announce a catastrophe. 
Four of the men had run away during the night. 
All was going so well yesterday that I flattered my- 
self I was to be spared this traditional experience — 
the most exasperating of all the traveller's woes, for 
the whole march must be delayed until fresh recruits 
are enlisted to carry the deserters' loads. The 
delinquents were all Bandawe men. They had no 
complaint. They stole nothing. It was a simple 
case of want of pluck. They were going into a 
strange land. The rainy season was coming on. 
Their loads were full-weight. So they got home- 
sick and ran. I had three more Bandawe* men in 
the caravan, and, knowing well that the moment 
they heard the news they would go and do likewise, 



94 WANDERINGS ON THE 

I ordered them to be told what had happened and 
then sent to my tent. In a few moments they 
appeared ; but what to say to them ? Their dialect 
was quite strange to me, and yet I felt I must 
impress them somehow. Like the judge putting on 
the black cap, I drew my revolver from under my 
pillow, and, laying it before me, proceeded to address 
them. Beginning with a few general remarks on 
the weather, I first briefly sketched the geology of 
Africa, and then broke into an impassioned defence 
of the British Constitution. The three miserable 
sinners — they had done nothing in the world — quaked 
like aspens. I then followed up my advantage by 
intoning, in a voice of awful solemnity, the enuncia- 
tion of the Forty-Seventh Proposition of Euclid, and 
then threw my all into a blood-curdling Quod erat 
demonstrandum. Scene two followed when I was 
alone ; I turned on my pillow and wept for shame. 
It was a prodigious piece of rascality, but I cannot 
imagine anything else that would have done, and it 
succeeded perfectly. These men were to the end the 
most faithful I had. They felt thenceforth they owed 
me their lives ; for, according to African custom, the 
sins of their fellow-tribesmen should have been visited 
upon them with the penalty of death. 

Seyid and Moolu scoured the country at once for 



NYASS A- TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 95 

more carriers, but met with blank refusals on every 
side. Many natives passed the camp, but they 
seemed in unusual haste and something of local 
importance was evidently going on. We were not 
long in doubt as to its nature. It was war. The 
Angoni were in force behind a neighbouring hill, and 
had already killed one man. This might have been 
startling, but I treated it as a piece of gossip, until 
suddenly a long string of armed and painted men 
appeared in sight and rushed past me at the double. 
They kept perfect step, running in single file, their 
feet adorned with anklets of rude bells which jingled 
in time and formed quite a martial accompaniment. 
The centre man held aloft a small red and white 
flag, and each warrior carried a large shield and 
several light barbed spears. The regiment was led 
by a fantastic-looking creature, who played a hideous 
slogan on a short pan-pipe. This main body was 
followed at intervals by groups of twos and threes 
who had been hastily summoned from their work, 
and I must say the whole turnout looked very like 
business. The last of the warriors had scarcely 
disappeared before another procession of a different 
sort set in from the opposite direction. It consisted 
of the women and children from the threatened 
villages farther up the valley. It was a melting 



WANDERINGS ON THE 



sight. The poor creatures were of all ages and sizes, 
from the tottering grandmother to the week -old 
infant. On their heads they carried a miscellaneous 
collection of household gods, and even the little 
children were burdened with a calabash, a grass-mat, 
a couple of fowls, or a handful of sweet-potatoes. 
Probably the entire effects of the villages were 
represented in these loads. Amongst the fugitives 
were a few goats and one or two calves, and a troop 
of boys brought up the rear driving before them a 
herd of cows. The poor creatures quickened their 
pace as they passed my tent, and eyed me as 
furtively as if I and my men had been a detachment 
from the Angoni executing a flank movement. The 
hamlet opposite our camp, across the river, which 
had gladdened us the night before with its twinkling 
fires, its inhabitants sitting peacefully at their doors 
or fishing in the stream, was already deserted — the 
men to fight, the women to flee for their lives they 
knew not whither. This is a common chapter in 
African history. Except among the very largest 
tribes no man can call his home his own for a 
month. 

I was amazed at the way my men treated the 
affair. They lounged about camp with the most 
perfect indifference. This was accounted for by my 



NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 97 

presence. The mere presence of a white man is 
considered an absolute guarantee of safety in remoter 
Africa. It is not his guns or his imposing retinue ; 
it is simply himself. He is not mortal, he is a spirit. 
Had I not been there, or had I shown the white 
feather, my men would have stampeded for Nyassa 
in a body. I had learned to understand the feeling 
so thoroughly that the events of the morning gave 
me no concern whatever, and I spent the day col- 
lecting in the usual way. 

It was impossible to go on and leave the loads ; 
it was equally impossible to get carriers at hand. 
So I despatched Seyid with a letter to the station 
on the Lake requesting six or eight natives to be 
sent from there. This meant a delay of two or 
three days at least, which, with the rains so near, was 
serious for me 

Made a " fly " for the tent ; collected, and read. 
One only feels the heat when doing nothing. As 
the sun climbed to its zenith my men put up for 
themselves the most enticing bowers. They were 
ingeniously made with interlacing grasses and canes, 
and densely thatched with banana leaves. 

Tried twice to bake bread, with Jingo and Moolu 
as assistant cooks. Both attempts dismal failures, so 
I had to draw on the biscuit-tins; I have plenty of 



9 8 WANDERINGS ON THE 

fowls, bought yesterday for beads. Maraya down 
with fever. One of the carriers, Siamuka, who had 
been left behind sick, straggled into camp, looking 
very ill indeed. Physicked him and gave him four 
yards of cloth to wrap himself in. Towards sunset 
I began to get anxious for news of battle. The 
arrival of the armed band which had passed in the 
morning soon gratified me. There had been no 
battle. There had been no Angoni. It was simply 
a scare — one of those false alarms which people in 
these unsettled circumstances are constantly liable to. 
All evening the women and children were trooping 
back to their homes ; and next morning our friends 
opposite were smoking their pipes at the doors again, 
as if nothing had happened. 

Tuesday, 2d October. — After morning cocoa had 
a walk with my hammer to examine the sections in 
the valley. Back to a good breakfast, cooked with 
all the art of Jingo, the real cook being at Karongas 
with the flag of distress. Moolu ill. This is the 
third man down with fever since we left the Lake. 
Bought some ufa and beans. Dispensed needles, and 
bent pins for fish-hooks, among the men. Held a 
great washing with Jingo. Towards the afternoon 
the reinforcements arrived from Karongas. The chief 
was drunk, it appeared, when my messenger reached 



NYASSA-TANGANY1KA PLATEAU 99 

him ; but Mr. Munro at the Lake kindly sent me a 
number of his own men. 

Another of my carriers begged leave to dissolve 
our partnership, and produced two youths whom 
he had beguiled into taking his load. His plea 
was that he was in bad odour at Mweni-wanda, and 
was afraid to go on. My own impression is that he 
found the load which he carried — on his head, like 
all Africans — was spoiling the cut of his hair. Even 
Africa has its exquisites, and this man was the swell 
all over. By " all over," I mean, of course, all over 
his head, for as his hair is his only clothing, except 
the bark loincloth of which the cut cannot well be 
varied, he had poured out the whole of his great soul 
upon his coiffure. At the best the African's hair is 
about the length of a toy-shop poodle's ; but vanity 
can make even a fool creative, and out of this scanty 
material and with extraordinary labour he had com- 
piled a masterpiece. First, heavily greased with 
ground-nut oil, it was made up into small-sized balls 
like black-currants, and then divided into symmetrical 
patterns, diamonds, circles, and parterres, designed 
with the skill of a landscape-gardener. To protect 
this work of art from nightly destruction, this gentle- 
man always carried with him a pillow of special 
make. It was constructed of wood, and dangled 

L.ofC. 



WANDERINGS ON THE 



conspicuously from his spear -head on the march 
He sold it to me ultimately for a yard of calico — 
and he certainly would not sleep after the transaction 
till he had laid the foundations of another. 

\2th October. — Got under weigh at early dawn. 
Much shirking and dodging among the men for light 
loads. Formerly sudden and suspicious fevers used 
to develop at this critical juncture — by a not unac- 
countable coincidence among the men with the 
heaviest loads; but my now well-known mixture, 
compounded of pepper, mustard, cold tea, citrate of 
magnesia, Epsom salts, anything else that might 
be handy, and a flavouring pinch of cinchona, has 
miraculously stayed the epidemic. But I forgive 
these merry fellows everything for wasting none of 
the morning coolness over toilet or breakfast. I 
need not say the African never washes in the 
morning ; but what is of more importance, he never 
eats. He rises suddenly from the ground where he 
has lain like a log all night, gives himself a shake, 
shoulders his load, and is off. Even at the mid-day 
halt he eats little ; but, if he can get it, will regale 
himself with a draught of water and a smoke. This 
last is a perfunctory performance, and one pipe 
usually serves for a dozen men. Each takes a whiff 
or two from the great wooden bowl, then passes it 



NY A SSA - TANGANYIKA PL A TEA U 



to his neighbour, and the pipe seldom makes a 
second round. 

I often wondered how the natives produced a 
light when camping by themselves, and at last 
resolved to test it. So when the usual appeal was 
made to me for " motu," I handed them my vesta- 
box with a single match in it. I generally struck 
the match for them, this being considered a very 
daring experiment, and I felt pretty sure they would 
make a mess of their one chance. It turned out as 
anticipated, and when they handed back the empty 
box, I looked as abstracted and unapproachable as 
possible. After a little suspense, one of them slowly 
drew from the sewn-up monkey skin, which served 
for his courier -bag, a small piece of wood about 
three inches long. With a spear-head he cut in it a 
round hole the size of a threepenny-piece. Placing 
his spear-blade flat on the ground to serve as a base, 
he stretched over it a scrap of bark-cloth torn from 
his girdle, and then pinned both down with the 
perforated piece of wood, which a second native held 
firmly in position. Next he selected from among 
his arrows a slender stick of very hard wood, inserted 
it vertically in the hole, and proceeded to twirl it 
round with great velocity between his open palms 
In less than half a minute the tinder was smoking 



WANDERINGS ON THE 



sulkily, and after a few more twirls it was ready for 
further treatment by vigorous blowing, when it broke 
into active flame. The fire originates, of course, in 
the small soft piece of wood, from which sparks fall 
upon the more inflammable bark-cloth at the bottom 
of the hole. 

Our daily programme, on the march, was some- 
thing like this. At the first streak of dawn my 
tent was struck. There is no time for a meal, for 
the cool early hour is too precious in the tropics to 
waste over eating ; but a hasty coffee while the loads 
were packing kept up the tradition of breakfast. In 
twenty minutes the men were marshalled, quarrels 
about an extra pound weight adjusted, and the pro- 
cession started. At the head of the column I usually 
walked myself, partly to see the country better, 
partly to look out for game, and partly, I suppose, 
because there was no one else to do it. Close 
behind me came my own special valet — a Makololo 
— carrying my geological hammer, water-bottle, and 
loaded rifle. The white man, as a rule, carries 
nothing except himself and a revolver, and possibly 
a double-awned umbrella, which, with a thick pith 
helmet, makes sunstroke impossible. Next Jingo 
marched the cook, a plausible Mananja, who could 
cook little, except his version of where the missing 



NYASSA- TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 103 

victuals went to. After the cook came another 
gentleman's gentleman carrying a gun and the 
medicine chest, and after him the rank and file, with 
another gun-bearer looking out for deserters at the 
rear. From half-past five I usually trudged on till 
the sun made moving torture, about ten or eleven. 
When I was fortunate enough to find shade and 
water there was a long rest till three in the after- 
noon, and an anomalous meal, followed by a second 
march till sunset. The dreadful part of the day was 
the interval. Then observations were made, and 
specimens collected and arranged, each man having 
to fill a collecting -box before sunset. When this 
was over there was nothing else to do that it was 
not too hot to do. It was too hot to sleep, there 
was nothing to read, and no one to speak to ; the 
nearest post-office was a thousand miles off, and the 
only amusement was to entertain the native chiefs, 
who used occasionally to come with their followers 
to stare at the white man. These interviews at first 
entertained one vastly, but the humbling perform- 
ances I had to go through became most intolerable. 
Think of having to stand up before a gaping crowd 
of savages and gravely button your coat — they had 
never seen a coat ; or, wonder of wonders, strike a 
match, or snap a revolver, or set fire to somebody's 



WANDERINGS ON THE 



bark clothes with a burning-glass. Three or four 
times a day often I had to go through these miser- 
able performances, and I have come home with a 
new sympathy for sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, the 
man with the iron jaw, and all that ilk. 

The interview commenced usually with the 
approach of two or three terror-stricken slaves, sent 
by the chief as a preliminary to test whether or not 
the white man would eat them. Their presents, 
native grains of some kind, being accepted, they 
concluded I was at least partly vegetarian, and the 
great man with his courtiers, armed with long spears, 
would advance and kneel down in a circle. A little 
speechifying followed, and then my return presents 
were produced — two or three yards of twopence- 
halfpenny calico ; and if he was a very great chief 
an empty Liebig pot or an old jam tin was also pre- 
sented with great ceremony. None of my instruments, 
I found, at all interested these people — they were 
quite beyond them ; and I soon found that in my 
whole outfit there were not half a dozen things which 
conveyed any meaning to them whatever. They did 
not know enough even to be amazed. The greatest 
wonder of all perhaps was the burning-glass. They 
had never seen glass before, and thought it was mazi 
or water, but why the mazi did not run over when I 



NYASSA-7ANGANYIKA PLATEAU 105 

put it in my pocket passed all understanding. When 
the light focused on the dry grass and set it ablaze 
their terror knew no bounds. " He is a mighty 
spirit," they cried, " and brings down fire from the 
sun !" This single remark contains the key to the 
whole secret of a white man's influence and power 
over all uncivilised tribes. Why a white man, alone 
and unprotected, can wander among these savage 
people without any risk from murder or robbery is 
a mystery at home. But it is his moral power, his 
education, his civilisation. To the African the white 
man is a supreme being. His commonest acts are 
miracles ; his clothes, his guns, his cooking utensils 
are supernatural. Everywhere his word is law. He 
can prevent death and war if he but speak the word. 
And let a single European settle, with fifty square 
miles of heathen round him, and in a short time he 
will be their king, their lawgiver, and their judge. 
I asked my men one day the question point blank — 
" Why do you not kill me and take my guns and 
clothes and beads ?" " Oh," they replied, il we would 
never kill a spirit." Their veneration for the white 
man indeed is sometimes most affecting. When war 
is brewing, or pestilence, they kneel before him and 
pray to him to avert it ; and so much do they believe 
in his omnipotence that an unprincipled man by 



io6 WANDERINGS ON THE 

trading on it, by simply offering pins, or buttons or 
tacks, or pieces of paper, or anything English, as 
charms against death, could almost drain a country 
of its ivory — the only native wealth. 

The real dangers to a traveller are of a simpler 
kind. Central Africa is the finest hunting country 
in the world. Here are the elephant, the buffalo, 
the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the hippo- 
potamus, the giraffe, the hyaena, the eland, the zebra, 
and endless species of small deer and antelope. 
Then the whole country is covered with traps to 
catch these animals — deep pits with a jagged stake 
rising up in the middle, the whole roofed over with 
turf and grass, so exactly like the forest bed that 
only the trained eye can detect their presence. I 
have found myself walking unconsciously on a 
narrow neck between two of these pits, when a 
couple of steps to either side would almost certainly 
have meant death. Snakes too, and especially the 
hideous and deadly puff adder, may turn up at any 
moment ; and in bathing, which one eagerly does at 
every pool, the sharpest lookout is scarcely a match 
for the diabolical craft of the crocodile. 

i$t/i October. — Walking through the forest to-day 
some distance ahead of my men, I suddenly came 
upon a rhinoceros. The creature — the rhino is 



NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 107 

solitary in his habits — was poking about the bush 
with its head down and did not see me, though not 
ten yards separated us. My only arms were a 
geological hammer and a revolver, so I had simply 
to lie down and watch him. Presently my gun- 
bearer crawled up, but unfortunately by this time 
the pachyderm had vanished, and was nowhere to be 
found. I broke my heart over it at the moment, 
though why in the world I should have killed him 
I do not in the least know now. In cold blood one 
resents Mr. Punch's typical Englishman — " What a 
heavenly morning ! let's go and kill something ! " 
but in presence of temptation one feels the veritable 
savage. 

We are now at an elevation of about four thou- 
sand feet, and steadily nearing the equator, although 
the climate gives little sign of it. It is a popular 
mistake that the nearer one goes to the equator the 
temperature must necessarily increase. Were this 
so, Africa, which is the most tropical continent in 
the world, would also be the hottest ; while the 
torrid zone, which occupies so large a portion of it, 
would be almost insupportable to the European. 
On the contrary, the nearer one goes to the equator 
in Africa it becomes the cooler. The reasons for 
this are twofold — the gradual elevation of the con- 



io8 WANDERINGS ON THE 

tinent towards the interior, and the increased amount 
of aqueous vapour in the air. Central Africa is 
from three to five thousand feet above the levei of 
the sea Now for every three hundred feet of ascent 
the thermometer falls one degree. It is immensely 
cooler, therefore, in the interior than at the coast ; 
and the equatorial zone all over the world possesses 
a climate in every way superior to that of the borders 
of the temperate region. At night, in Equatorial 
Africa, it is really cold, and one seldom lies down in 
his tent with less than a couple of blankets and a 
warm quilt The heat of New York is often greater 
than that of Central Africa ; for while in America 
a summer rarely passes without the thermometer 
reaching three figures, in the hottest month in Africa 
my thermometer never registered more than two on 
a single occasion — the highest actual point reached 
being 96°. Nowhere, indeed, in Africa have I experi- 
enced anything like the heat of a summer in Malta, 
or even of a stifling August in Southern Germany 
or Italy. On the other hand, the direct rays of the 
sun are necessarily more powerful in Africa ; but so 
long as one keeps in the shade — and even a good 
umbrella suffices for this — there is nothing in the 
climate to disturb one's peace of mind or body. 
When one really feels the high temperature is when 



NYASSA-TANGANY1KA PLATEAU 109 

down with fever ; or when fever, unknown to one, is 
coming on. Then, indeed, the heat becomes madden- 
ing and insupportable ; nor has the victim words to 
express his feelings towards the glittering ball, whose 
daily march across the burnished and veilless zenith 
brings him untold agony. 

i^th to 22d October. — This camp is so well situ- 
ated that I have spent the week in it. The pro- 
gramme is the same every day. At dawn Jingo 
came to my tent with early coffee. Went out with 
my gun for a morning stroll, and returned in an 
hour for breakfast. Thereafter I sorted the speci- 
mens captured the day before, and hung up the 
fatter insects to dry in the sun. Routing the ants 
from the boxes and provision stores was also an 
important and vexatious item. Some ants are so 
clever that they can break into everything, and 
others so small that they will crawl into anything ; 
and between the clever ones, and the small ones, and 
the jam-loving ones, and the flour-eating ones, and 
the specimen-devouring ones, subsistence, not to say 
science, is a serious problem. The only things that 
have hitherto baffled them are the geological speci- 
mens ; but I overhaul these regularly every morning 
along with the rest, in terror of one day finding some 
precocious creature browsing off my granites. After 



WANDERINGS ON THE 



these labours I repaired to a natural bower in the 
dry bed of a shaded streamlet, where I spent the 
entire day. Here, even at high noon, was perfect 
coolness, and rest, and solitude unutterable. I lay 
among birds and beasts and flowers and insects, 
watching their ways, and trying to enter into their 
unknown lives. To watch uninterruptedly the same 
few yards of universe unfold its complex history ; 
to behold the hourly resurrection of new living 
things, and miss no change or circumstance, even of 
its minuter parts ; to look at all, especially the 
things you have seen before, a hundred times, to do 
all with patience and reverence — this is the only 
way to study nature. 

Towards the afternoon the men began to drop 
in with their boxes of insects, each man having to 
collect a certain number every camp-day. If suffi- 
cient were not brought in the delinquent had to go 
back to the bush for more. At five or six I went 
back to my tent for dinner, and after an hour over 
the camp-fire turned in for the night. The chatter- 
ing of the men all round the tent usually kept me 
awake for an hour or two. Their merriest time is 
just after sunset, when the great ufa-feast of the dav 
takes place. The banter between the fires is kept 
up till the small hours, and the chief theme of con- 



NY ASS A - TANGANYIKA PL A TEA V 



versation is always the white man himself — what 
the white man did, and what the white man said, 
and now the white man held his gun, and every- 
thing else the white man thought, looked, willed, 
wore, ate, or drank. My object in being there was 
an insoluble riddle to them, and for what witchcraft 
I collected all the stones and insects was an unending 
source of speculation. 

That they entered to some extent into one at least 
of these interests was proved that very night. I was 
roused rather late by a deputation, who informed me 
that they had just discovered a very uncommon object 
crawling on a stick among the firewood. Going out 
to the fire, and stirring the embers into a blaze, I was 
shown one of the most extraordinary insects it has 
been my lot to look upon. Rather over two inches 
in length, the creature lay prone upon a branch, 
adroitly shamming death, after the manner of the 
Mantidce, to which it obviously belonged. The 
striking feature was a glittering coal-black spiral, 
with a large central spot of the same colour, painted 
on the middle of the back ; the whole resembling 
a gigantic eye staring out from the body, and 
presenting the most vivid contrast to the lemon 
yellows and greens of the rest of the insect. One 
naturally sought a mimetic explanation of the singular 



U2 WANDERINGS ON THE 

marking, and I at once recalled a large fringed lichen 
which covered many of the surrounding trees, and of 
which this whole insect was a most apt copy. That 
it was as rare as it was eccentric was evident from 
the astonishment of the natives, who declared that 
they had never seen it before. 

22d October. — Water has been scarce for some 
days, and this morning our one pool was quite dried 
up, so I struck camp. Marching north-west, over 
an undulating forest country, we came to a small 
village, near which was a running stream. The 
chief, an amiable old gentleman, after an hour spent 
in suspicious prospecting, came to see the show, and 
propitiated its leading actor with a present of flour. 
In return I gave him some cloth and an empty 
magnesia bottle to hold his snuff. The native snuff- 
mull is a cylinder of wood profusely carved, and, in 
the absence of a pocket, hangs tied round the neck 
with a thong. Snuffing is universal hereabouts. 

This is a hotter camp than the last, though the 
elevation (4500 feet) is nearly the same. Paid the 
men their fortnight's wage in cloth, and as I threw 
in an extra fathom they held high revelry till far on 
in the night. 

24//* October. — Buffalo fever still on. Sallied 
forth early with Moolu, a large herd being reported 



NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 113 

at hand. We struck the trail after a few miles, but 
the buffaloes had moved away, passing up a steep 
valley to the north and clearing a hill. I followed, 
but saw no sign, and after one or two unsuccessful 
starts gave it up as the heat had become terrific. 
Breakfasted off wild honey, which one of the natives 
managed to lay hands on, and sent for the camp to 
come up. Moolu went on with one native, T'Shaula 
— he of the great spear and the black feathers. 
They returned about two o'clock announcing that 
they had dropped two bull buffaloes, but not being 
mortally wounded the quarry had made off. Late 
in the afternoon two of my men rushed in saying 
that one of the wounded buffaloes had attacked two 
of their number, one severely, and that assistance 
was wanted to carry them back. It seems that five 
of the men, on hearing Moolu's report about the 
wounded buffaloes, and tempted by the thought of 
fresh meat, set off without permission to try to secure 
them. It was a foolhardy freak, as they had only 
a spear with them, and a wounded buffalo bull is 
the most dangerous animal in Africa. It charges 
blindly at anything, and even after receiving its mortal 
wound has been known to kill its assailant The 
would-be hunters soon overtook one of the creatures, 
a huge bull, lying in a hollow, and apparently in 



ii 4 WANDERINGS ON THE 

articulo mortis. They calmly walked up to it — the 
maddest thing in the world — when the brute suddenly 
roused itself and charged headlong. They ran for 
their lives ; one was overtaken and trampled down 
in a moment ; the second was caught up a few yards 
farther on and literally impaled on the animal's 
horns. The first hobbled into camp little the worse, 
but the latter was brought in half dead. He had 
two frightful wounds, the less serious on the back 
behind the shoulder-blade, the other a yawning gash 
just under the ribs. I fortunately had a little lint 
and dressed his wounds as well as I could, but I 
thought he would die in my hands. He was quite 
delirious, and I ordered a watch all night in case the 
bleeding should break out afresh. His nurses un- 
happily could not take in the philosophy of this, and 
I had to turn out every hour to see that they were 
not asleep. The native's conception of pain is that 
it is the work of an evil spirit, and the approved 
treatment consists in blowing upon the wound and 
suspending a wooden charm from the patient's neck 
to exorcise it. All this was duly done now, and the 
blowing was repeated at frequent intervals through 
the night. 

25//* October. — Kacquia conscious, and suffering 
much. It is impossible to go on, so the men have 



NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU 115 

rigged up a bower for me on the banks of a stream 
near the camp. Read, wrote, physicked right and 
left, and received the Chief of Something-or-other. 
Bribed some of his retinue to search the district 
for indiarubber, and bring specimens of the trees. 
After many hours absence they brought me back two 
freshly-made balls, but neglected to bring a branch, 
which was what I promised to pay them for. From 
their description I gather the tree is the Landolphia 
vine. The method of securing the rubber is to 
make incisions in the stem and smear the exuding 
milky juice over their arms and necks. After it has 
dried a little they scrape it off and roll it up into balls. 
An instance of what the native will do for a scrap 
of meat. Near camp this morning Moolu pointed 
out to me a gray lump on the top of a very high 
tree, which he assured me was an animal. It was a 
kind of lemur, and very good to eat. I had only 
my Winchester with me, and the ball ripped up the 
animal, which fell at once, but leaving an ounce or 
two of viscera on the branch. One of the men, 
Makata, coming up at the sound of the shot, per- 
ceived that the animal was not all there — it had 
been literally "cleaned" — immediately started to 
climb the tree for the remainder. It was a naked 
stem for a considerable height and thicker than 



ri6 WANDERINGS ON THE 

himself, but he attacked it at once native fashion, i.e 
by walking up the trunk, his clasped hands grasping 
the trunk on the opposite side from his doubled-up 
body, and literally walking upward on his soles. 
He soon came down with the precious mess, and in 
a few minutes it was cooked and eaten. 

To-night I thought my hour was come. Our 
camp was right in the forest ; it was pitch dark ; 
and I was sitting late over the smouldering fire with 
the wounded man. Suddenly a terrific yell rang 
out from the forest, and a native rushed straight at 
me brandishing his spear and whooping at the 
pitch of his voice. Sure that it was an attack, 
I darted towards the tent for my rifle, and in 
a second every man in the camp was huddling in 
it likewise. Some dashed in headlong by the door, 
others under the canvas, until there was not room to 
crawl among their bodies. Then followed — nothing. 
First an awful silence, then a whispering, then a 
mighty laughter, and then the whole party sneaked 
out of the fort and yelled with merriment. One of 
my own men had crept out a few yards for firewood ; 
he had seen a leopard, and lost control of himself — 
that was all. It is hard to say who was most 
chaffed about it ; but I confess I did not realise 
before how simple a business it would have been for 



NYASSA-TANGANY1KA PLATEAU 117 

any one who did not approve of the white man to 
exterminate him and his caravan. 

Sunday, 28t/i October. — My patient holding on ; 
will now probably pull through. As he has to be fed 
on liquids, my own fowls have all gone in chicken 
soup. Fowls are now very scarce, and my men, 
taking advantage of the high premium and urgent 
demand, have gone long distances to get them. 
They will not supply them to the invalid, but sell 
them to me to give him. Wishing to teach them a 
lesson in philanthropy, I declined to buy any more 
on these terms ; and after seeing me go three days 
dinnerless to give Kacquia his chance of life they 
became ashamed of themselves, and handed me all 
the fowls they had in a present. This was a pro- 
digious effort for a native, and proves him capable 
of better things. The whole camp had been watch- 
ing this byplay for a day or two, and the finish did 
good all round — more especially as I gave a return 
present, after a judicious interval, worth five times 
what had been given me. 

Held the usual service in the evening — a piece 
of very primitive Christianity. Moolu, who had 
learned much from Dr. Laws, undertook the sermon, 
and discoursed with great eloquence on the Tower 
of Babel. The preceding Sunday he had waxed 



n8 WANDERINGS ON THE 

equally warm over the Rich Man and Lazarus ; and 
his description of the Rich Man in terms of native 
ideas of wealth — " plenty of calico and plenty of 
beads" — was a thing to remember. "Mission- 
blacks," in Natal and at the Cape, are a byword 
among the unsympathetic ; but I never saw Moolu 
do an inconsistent thing. He could neither read 
nor write ; he knew only some dozen words of 
English ; until seven years ago he had never seen a 
white man ; but I could trust him with everything I 
had. He was not " pious " ; he was neither bright 
nor clever ; he was a commonplace black ; but he 
did his duty and never told a lie. The first night 
of our camp, after all had gone to rest, I remember 
being roused by a low talking. I looked out of my 
tent ; a flood of moonlight lit up the forest ; and 
there, kneeling upon the ground, was a little group of 
natives, and Moolu in the centre conducting evening 
prayers. Every night afterwards this service was 
repeated, no matter how long the march was nor 
how tired the men. I make no comment But 
this I will say — Moolu's life gave him the right 
to do it. Mission reports are often said to be 
valueless ; they are less so than anti-mission reports. 
I believe in missions, for one thing, because I believe 
in Moolu. 



NYASSA-TANQANYIKA PLATEAU 119 

But I need not go on with this itinerary. It is 
very much the same thing over again. For some 
time yet you must imagine the curious procession I 
have described wandering hither and thither among 
the wooded mountains and valleys of the table-land, 
and going through the same general programme. 
You might have seen its chief getting browner and 
browner in the tropical sun, his clothes getting 
raggeder and raggeder, his collecting-boxes becoming 
fuller and fuller, and his desire to get home again 
growing stronger and stronger. Then you might 
have seen the summer end and the tropical rains 
begin, and the whole country suddenly ciothe itself 
with living green. And then, as the season advanced, 
you might have seen him plodding back to the Lake, 
between the attacks of fever working his way down 
the Shire* and Zambesi, and so, after many days ; 
greeting the new spring in England. 



VI 
THE WHITE ANT 

A THEORY 



VI 

THE WHITE ANT 
A THEORY 

A FEW years ago, under the distinguished 
**• patronage of Mr. Darwin, the animal in vogue 
with scientific society was the worm. At present 
the fashionable animal is the ant. I am sorry, there- 
fore, to have to begin by confessing that the insect 
whose praises I propose to sing, although bearing 
the honoured name, is not entitled to consideration 
on account of its fashionable connections, since the 
white ant, as an ant, is an impostor. It is, in fact, 
not an ant at all, but belongs to a much humbler 
family — that of the Termitidcs — and so far from ever 
having been the vogue, this clever but artful creature 
is hated and despised by all civilised peoples. 
Nevertheless, if I mistake not, there is neither among 
the true ants, nor among the worms, an insect which 
plays a more wonderful or important part in nature. 



I2 4 THE WHITE ANT 

Fully to appreciate the beauty of this function, a 
glance at an apparently distant aspect of nature will 
be necessary as a preliminary. 

When we watch the farmer at work, and think 
how he has to plough, harrow, manure, and humour 
the soil before even one good crop can be coaxed 
out of it, we are apt to wonder how nature manages 
to secure her crops and yet dispense with all these 
accessories. The world is one vast garden, bringing 
forth crops of the most luxuriant and varied kind 
century after century, and millennium after millen- 
nium. Yet the race of nature is nowhere furrowed by 
the plough, no harrow disintegrates the clods, no lime 
and phosphates are strewn upon its fields, no visible 
tillage of the soil improves the work on the great 
world's farm. 

Now, in reality, there cannot be crops, or succes- 
sions of crops, without the most thorough agriculture ; 
and when we look more closely into nature we dis- 
cover a system of husbandry of the most surprising 
kind. Nature does all things unobtrusively ; and it 
is only now that we are beginning to see the magni- 
tude of these secret agricultural operations by which 
she does already all that man would wish to imitate, 
and to which his most scientific methods are but 
clumsy approximations. 



A THEORY 125 



In this great system of natural husbandry nature 
uses agencies, implements, and tools of many kinds. 
There is the disintegrating frost, that great natural 
harrow, which bursts asunder the clods by the ex- 
pansion during freezing of the moisture imprisoned 
in their pores. There is the communistic wind which 
scatters broadcast over the fields the finer soil in clouds 
of summer dust. There is the rain which washes 
the humus into the hollows, and scrapes bare the 
rocks for further denudation. There is the air 
which, with its carbonic acid and oxygen, dissolves 
and decomposes the stubborn hills, and manufactures 
out of them the softest soils of the valley. And 
there are the humic acids, generated through decay, 
which filter through the ground and manure and 
enrich the new-made soils. 

But this is not all, nor is this enough ; to prepare 
a surface film, however rich, and to manure the soil 
beneath, will secure one crop, but not a succession of 
crops. There must be a mixture and transference of 
these layers, and a continued mixture and transference, 
kept up from age to age. The lower layer of soil, 
exhausted with bringing forth, must be transferred to 
the top for change of air, and there it must lie for a 
long time, increasing its substance, and recruiting its 
strength among the invigorating elements. The upper 



126 THE WHITE ANT 

film, restored, disintegrated, saturated with fertility 
and strength, must next be slowly lowered down 
again to where the rootlets are lying in wait for it, 
deep in the under soil. 

Now how is this last change brought about ? 
Man turns up the crust with the plough, throwing 
up the exhausted earth, down the refreshed soil, 
with infinite toil and patience. And nature does it 
by natural ploughmen who, with equal industry, are 
busy all over the world reversing the earth's crust, 
turning it over and over from year to year, only much 
more slowly and much more thoroughly, spadeful 
by spadeful, foot by foot, and even grain by grain. 
Before Adam delved the Garden of Eden these 
natural agriculturists were at work, millions and 
millions of them in every part of the globe, at differ- 
ent seasons and in different ways, tilling the world's 
fields. 

According to Mr. Darwin, the animal which per- 
forms this most important function in nature is the 
earthworm. The marvellous series of observations 
by which the great naturalist substantiated his 
conclusion are too well known for repetition. Mr 
Darwin calculates that on every acre of land in 
England more than ten tons of dry earth are passed 
through the bodies of worms and brought to the 



A THEORY 127 



surface every year ; and he assures us that the whole 
soil of the country must pass and repass through 
their bodies every few years. Some of this earth is 
brought up from a considerable depth beneath the 
soil, for, in order to make its subterranean burrow, 
the animal is compelled to swallow a certain quantity 
of earth. It eats its way, in fact, to the surface, and 
there voids the material in a little heap. Although 
the proper diet of worms is decaying vegetable 
matter, dragged down from the surface in the form 
of leaves and tissues of plants, there are many occa- 
sions on which this source of aliment fails, and the 
animal has then to nourish itself by swallowing 
quantities of earth, for the sake of the organic sub- 
stances it contains. In this way the worm has a 
twofold inducement to throw up earth. First, to 
dispose of the material excavated from its burrow ; 
and second, to obtain adequate nourishment in times 
of famine. " When we behold a wide, turf-covered 
expanse," says Mr. Darwin, " we should remember 
that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty 
depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having 
been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous 
reflection that the whole of the superficial mould 
over any such expanse has passed, and will again 
pass, every few years, through the bodies of worms. 



/28 THE WHITE ANT 

The plough is one of the most ancient and most 
valuable of man's inventions ; but long before he 
existed the land was, in fact, regularly ploughed by 
earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are 
many other animals which have played so important 
a part in the history of the world as have these lowly 
organised creatures." l 

Now without denying the very important contri- 
bution of the earthworm in this respect, a truth 
sufficiently endorsed by the fact that the most cir- 
cumstantial of naturalists has devoted a whole book 
to this one animal, I would humbly bring forward 
another claimant to the honour of being, along with 
the worm, the agriculturist of nature. While ad- 
mitting to the fullest extent the influence of worms 
in countries which enjoy a temperate and humid 
climate, it can scarcely be allowed that the same 
influence is exerted, or can possibly be exerted, in 
tropical lands. No man was less in danger of taking 
a provincial view of nature than Mr. Darwin, and in 
discussing the earthworm he has certainly collected 
evidence from different parts of the globe. He 
refers, although sparingly, and with less than his 
usual wealth of authorities, to worms being found in 

1 VepetabU Mould and Earth Worms, p. 313. 



A THEORY 129 



Iceland, in Madagascar, in the United States, Brazil, 
New South Wales, India, and Ceylon. But his 
facts, with regard especially to the influence, on the 
large scale, of the worm in warm countries, are few 
or wholly wanting. Africa, for instance, the most 
tropical country in the world, is not referred to at 
all ; and where the activities of worms in the tropics 
are described, the force of the fact is modified by 
the statement that these are only exerted during the 
limited number of weeks of the rainy season. 

The fact is, for the greater portion of the year in 
the tropics the worm cannot operate at all. The 
soil, baked into a brick by the burning sun, abso- 
lutely refuses a passage to this soft and delicate 
animal. All the members of the earthworm tribe, 
it is true, are natural skewers, and though boring is 
their supreme function, the substance of these skewers 
is not hardened iron, and the pavement of a tropical 
forest is quite as intractable for nine months in the 
year as are the frost-bound fields to the farmer's 
ploughshare. During the brief period of the rainy 
season worms undoubtedly carry on their function 
in some of the moister tropical districts ; and in the 
sub -tropical regions of South America and India, 
worms, small and large, appear with the rains in 
endless numbers. But on the whole the tropics 

K 



1 3 o THE WHITE ANT 

proper seem to be poorly supplied with worms. In 
Central Africa, though I looked for them often, I 
never saw a single worm. Even when the rainy 
season set in, the closest search failed to reveal any 
trace either of them or of their casts. Nevertheless, 
so wide is the distribution of this animal, that in the 
moister regions even of the equatorial belt one should 
certainly expect to find it. But the general fact 
remains. Whether we consider the comparative 
poorness of their development, or the limited period 
during which they can operate, the sustained per- 
formance of the agricultural function by worms, over 
large areas in tropical countries, is impossible. 

Now as this agricultural function can never be 
dispensed with, it is more than probable that nature 
will have there commissioned some other animal to 
undertake the task. And there are several other 
animals to whom this difficult and laborious duty 
might be entrusted. There is the mole, for instance, 
with its wonderful spade-like feet, that natural navvy, 
who shovels the soil about so vigorously at home ; 
but against the burnt crust of the tropics even this 
most determined of burrowers would surely turn the 
edge of his nails. The same remark applies to those 
curious little geologists the marmots and skipmunks, 
which one sees throwing up their tiny heaps of sand 



A THEORY 



and gravel on the American prairies. And though 
the torrid zone boasts of a strong-limbed and almost 
steel -shod creature, the ant-bear, his ravages are 
limited to the destruction of the nests of ants ; and 
however much this somewhat scarce animal contri- 
butes to the result, we must look in another direction 
for the true tropical analogue of the worm. 

The animal we are in search of, and which I 
venture to think equal to all the necessities of the 
case, is the termite or white ant. It is a small 
insect, with a bloated, yellowish-white body, and a 
somewhat large thorax, oblong-shaped, and coloured 
a disagreeable oily brown. The flabby, tallow-like 
body makes this insect sufficiently repulsive, but it 
is for quite another reason that the white ant is the 
worst abused of all living vermin in warm countries. 
The termite lives almost exclusively upon wood ; 
and the moment a tree is cut or a log sawn for any 
economical purpose, this insect is upon its track. 
One may never see the insect, possibly, in the flesh, 
for it lives underground ; but its ravages confront 
one at every turn. You build your house, perhaps, 
and for a few months fancy you have pitched upon 
the one solitary site in the country where there are 
no white ants. But one day suddenly the door-post 
totters, and lintel and rafters come down together 



132 THE WHITE ANT 

with a crash. You look at a section of the wrecked 
timbers, and discover that the whole inside is eaten 
clean away. The apparently solid logs of which the 
rest of the house is built are now mere cylinders of 
bark, and through the thickest of them you could 
push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, 
chests of drawers, everything made of wood, is in- 
evitably attacked, and in a single night a strong 
trunk is often riddled through and through, and 
turned into matchwood. There is no limit, in fact, 
to the depredation by these insects, and they will 
eat books, or leather, or cloth, or anything ; and in 
many parts of Africa I believe if a man lay down to 
sleep with a wooden leg it would be a heap of saw- 
dust in the morning. So much feared is this insect 
now, that no one in certain parts of India and Africa 
ever attempts to travel with such a thing as a wooden 
trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped 
on ground which was as hard as adamant, and as 
innocent of white ants apparently as the pavement 
of St. Paul's, and wakened next morning to find a 
stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather 
portmanteaus share the same fate, and the only sub- 
stances which seem to defy the marauders are iron 
and tin. 

But what has this to do with earth or with agri- 



A THEORY 133 



culture ? The most important point in the work of 
the white ant remains to be noted. I have already 
said that the white ant is never seen. Why he 
should have such a repugnance to being looked at 
is at first sight a mystery, seeing that he himself is 
stone blind. But his coyness is really due to the 
desire for self-protection, for the moment his juicy 
body shows itself above ground there are a dozen 
enemies waiting to devour it. And yet the white 
ant can never procure any food until it comes above 
ground. Nor will it meet the case for the insect to 
come to the surface under the shadow of night. 
Night in the tropics, so far as animal life is con- 
cerned, is as the day. It is the great feeding time, 
the great fighting time, the carnival of the carnivores, 
and of all beasts, birds, and insects of prey from the 
least to the greatest. It is clear then that darkness 
is no protection to the white ant ; and yet without 
coming out of the ground it cannot live. How does 
it solve the difficulty ? It takes the ground out 
along with it I have seen white ants working on 
the top of a high tree, and yet they were under- 
ground. They took up some of the ground with 
them to the tree- top ; just as the Esquimaux heap 
up snow, building it into the low tunnel-huts in 
which they live, so the white ants collect earth, only 



134 THE WHITE ANT 

in this case not from the surface but from some 
depth underneath the ground, and plaster it into 
tunnelled ways. Occasionally these run along the 
ground, but more often mount in endless ramifica- 
tions to the top of trees, meandering along every 
branch and twig, and here and there debouching into 
large covered chambers which occupy half the girth 
of the trunk. Millions of trees in some districts are 
thus fantastically plastered over with tubes, galleries, 
and chambers of earth, and many pounds weight of 
subsoil must be brought up for the mining of even a 
single tree. The building material is conveyed by 
the insects up a central pipe with which all the 
galleries communicate, and which at the downward 
end connects with a series of subterranean passages 
leading deep into the earth. The method of building 
the tunnels and covered ways is as follows : — At the 
foot of a tree the tiniest hole cautiously opens in the 
ground close to the bark. A small head appears 
with a grain of earth clasped in its jaws. Against 
the tree-trunk this earth-grain is deposited, and the 
head is withdrawn. Presently it reappears with 
another grain of earth, this is laid beside the first, 
rammed tight against it, and again the builder de- 
scends underground for more. The third grain is 
not placed against the tree, but against the former 




A, Male. B, Worker. C, Soldier. D, Fecundated Female of Termes bellicosus, natural 
size, surrounded by "Workers." 



A THEORY 137 



grain ; a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth follow, and the 
plan of the foundation begins to suggest itself as 
soon as these are in position. The stones or grains 
or pellets of earth are arranged in a semicircular 
wall, the termite, now assisted by three or four 
others, standing in the middle between the sheltering 
wall and the tree, and working briskly with head and 
mandible to strengthen the position. The wall in 
fact forms a small moon-rampart, and as it grows 
higher and higher it soon becomes evident that it is 
going to grow from a low battlement into a long 
perpendicular tunnel running up the side of the 
tree. The workers, safely ensconced inside, are now 
carrying up the structure with great rapidity, dis- 
appearing in turn as soon as they have laid their 
stone and rushing off to bring up another. The 
way in which the building is done is extremely 
curious, and one could watch the movement of these 
wonderful little masons by the hour. Each stone as 
it is brought to the top is first of all covered with 
mortar. Of course, without this the whole tunnel 
would crumble into dust before reaching the height 
of half an inch ; but the termite pours over the stone 
a moist sticky secretion, turning the grain round and 
round with its mandibles until the whole is covered 
with slime. Then it places the stone with great 



138 THE WHITE ANT 

care upon the top of the wall, works it about vigor- 
ously for a moment or two till it is well jammed 
into its place, and then starts off instantly for 
another load. 

Peering over the growing wall, one soon discovers 
one, two, or more termites of a somewhat larger 
build, considerably longer, and with a very different 
arrangement of the parts of the head, and especially 
of the mandibles. These important -looking indi- 
viduals saunter about the rampart in the most 
leisurely way, but yet with a certain air of business, 
as if perhaps the one was the master of works and 
the other the architect. But closer observation 
suggests that they are in no wise superintending 
operations, nor in any immediate way contributing to 
the structure, for they take not the slightest notice 
either of the workers or the works. They are posted 
there in fact as sentries, and there they stand, or 
promenade about, at the mouth of every tunnel, like 
sister Ann, to see if anybody is coming. Sometimes 
somebody does come in the shape of another ant — ■ 
the real ant this time, not the defenceless Neur- 
opteron, but some valiant and belted knight from the 
warlike Formicidce. Singly, or in troops, this rapa- 
cious little insect, fearless in its chitinous coat of 
mail, charges down the tree-trunk, its antennae waving 



A THEORY 139 



defiance to the enemy, and its cruel mandibles thirst- 
ing for termite blood. The worker white ant is a 
poor defenceless creature, and, blind and unarmed, 
would fall an immediate prey to these well-drilled 
banditti, who forage about in every tropical forest 
in unnumbered legion. But at the critical moment, 
like Goliath from the Philistines, the soldier termite 
advances to the fight. With a few sweeps of its 
scythe-like jaws it clears the ground, and while the 
attacking party is carrying off its dead, the builders, 
unconscious of the fray, quietly continue their work. 
To every hundred workers in a white ant colony, 
which numbers many thousands of individuals, there 
are perhaps two of these fighting men. The division 
of labour here is very wonderful, and the fact that 
besides these two specialised forms there are in every 
nest two other kinds of the same insect, the kings 
and queens, shows the remarkable height to which 
civilisation in these communities has attained. 

But where is this tunnel going to, and what 
object have the insects in view in ascending this 
lofty tree ? Thirty feet from the ground, across 
innumerable forks, at the end of a long branch, are 
a few feet of dead wood. How the ants know it is 
there, how they know its sap has dried up, and that 
it is now fit for the termites' food, is a mystery. 



140 THE WHITE ANT 

Possibly they do not know, and are only prospecting 
on the chance. The fact that they sometimes make 
straight for the decaying limb argues in these in- 
stances a kind of definite instinct ; but, on the other 
hand, the fact that in most cases the whole tree, 
in every branch and limb, is covered with termite 
tunnels, would show perhaps that they work most 
commonly on speculation, while the number of aban- 
doned tunnels, ending on a sound branch in a cul de 
sac, proves how often they must suffer the usual dis- 
appointments of all such adventurers. The extent 
to which these insects carry on their tunnelling is 
quite incredible until one has seen it in nature with 
his own eyes. The tunnels are perhaps about the 
thickness of a small -sized gas -pipe, but there are 
junctions here and there of large dimensions, and 
occasionally patches of earthwork are found embrac- 
ing nearly the whole trunk for some feet The out- 
side of these tunnels, which are never quite straight, 
but wander irregularly along stem and branch, 
resembles in texture a coarse sandpaper ; and the 
colour, although this naturally varies with the soil, is 
usually a reddish brown. The quantity of earth and 
mud plastered over a single tree is often enormous ; 
and when one thinks that it is not only an isolated 
specimen here and there that is frescoed in this way, 



A THEORY 141 



but often the whole of the trees of a forest, some idea 
will be formed of the magnitude of the operations of 
these insects and the extent of their influence upon 
the soil which they are thus ceaselessly transporting 
from underneath the ground. 

In travelling through the great forests of the 
Rocky Mountains or of the Western States, the 
broken branches and fallen trunks strewing the 
ground breast-high with all sorts of decaying litter 
frequently make locomotion impossible. To attempt 
to ride through these western forests, with their mesh- 
work of interlocked branches and decaying trunks, 
is often out of the question, and one has to dismount 
and drag his horse after him as if he were clamber- 
ing through a woodyard. But in an African forest 
not a fallen branch is seen. One is struck at first 
at a certain clean look about the great forests of the 
interior, a novel and unaccountable cleanness, as if 
the forest-bed was carefully swept and dusted daily 
by unseen elves. And so, indeed, it is. Scavengers 
of a hundred kinds remove decaying animal matter 
— from the carcase of a fallen elephant to the broken 
wing of a gnat — eating it, or carrying it out of sight, 
and burying it on the deodorising earth. And these 
countless millions of termites perform a similar 
function for the vegetable world, making away with 



142 



THE WHITE ANT 



all plants and trees, all stems, twigs, and tissues, the 
moment the finger of decay strikes the signal. Con- 
stantly in these woods one comes across what appear 
to be sticks and branches and bundles of faggots, 
but when closely examined they are seen to be mere 
casts in mud. From these hollow tubes, which pre- 




a, Tunnel, b, Earth, c, Shreds of outer Bark. 
d, Remains of Branch. 



serve the original form of the branch down to the 
minutest knot or fork, the ligneous tissue is often 
entirely removed, while others are met with in all 
stages of demolition. There is the section of 
an actual specimen, which is not yet completely 
destroyed, and from which the mode of attack may 
be easily seen. The insects start apparently from 
two centres. One company attacks the inner bark, 



^ „ 









J¥mM 







A THEORY 145 



which is the favourite morsel, leaving the coarse 
outer bark untouched, or more usually replacing it 
with grains of earth, atom by atom, as they eat it 
away. The inner bark is gnawed off likewise as 
they go along, but the woody tissue beneath is 
allowed to remain to form a protective sheath for 
the second company who begin work at the centre. 
This second contingent eats its way outward and 
onward, leaving a thin tube of the outer wood to 
the last, as props to the mine, till they have finished 
the main excavation. When a fallen trunk lying 
upon the ground is the object of attack, the outer 
cylinder is frequently left quite intact, and it is only 
when one tries to drag it off to his camp-fire that 
he finds to his disgust that he is dealing with a 
mere hollow tube a few lines in thickness filled up 
with mud. 

But the works above ground represent only a 
part of the labours of these slow-moving but most 
industrious of creatures. The arboreal tubes are 
only the prolongation of a much more elaborate 
system of subterranean tunnels, which extend over 
large areas and mine the earth sometimes to a depth 
of many feet or even yards. 

The material excavated from these underground 
galleries and from the succession of domed chambers 

L 



i 4 6 THE WHITE ANT 

— used as nurseries or granaries — to which they 
lead, has to be thrown out upon the surface. And 
it is from these materials that the huge ant-hills are 
reared, which form so distinctive a feature of the 
African landscape. These heaps and mounds are 
so conspicuous that they may be seen for miles, and 
so numerous are they and so useful as cover to the 




sportsman, that without them in certain districts 
hunting would be impossible. The first things, 
indeed, to strike the traveller in entering the interior 
are the mounds of the white ant, now dotting the 
plain in groups like a small cemetery, now rising 
into mounds, singly or in clusters, each thirty or forty 
feet in diameter and ten or fifteen in height ; or, 
again, standing out against the sky like obelisks, 
their bare sides carved and fluted into all sorts of 
fantastic shapes. In India these ant-heaps seldom 
attain a height of more than a couple of feet, but in 



A THEORY 149 



Central Africa they form veritable hills, and contain 
many tons of earth. The brick houses of the Scotch 
mission-station on Lake Nyassa have all been built 
out of a single ants' nest, and the quarry from which 
the material has been derived forms a pit beside the 
settlement some dozen feet in depth. A supply of 
bricks, as large again, could probably still be taken 
from this convenient depot ; and the missionaries on 
Lake Tanganyika and onwards to Victoria Nyanza 
have been similarly indebted to the labours of the 
termites. In South Africa the Zulus and Kaffirs 
pave all their huts with white-ant earth ; and during 
the Boer war our troops in Praetoria, by scooping 
out the interior from the smaller beehive-shaped ant- 
heaps, and covering the top with clay, constantly 
used them as ovens. These ant-heaps may be said 
to abound over the whole interior of Africa, and 
there are several distinct species. The most peculiar, 
as well as the most ornate, is a small variety from 
one to two feet in height, which occurs in myriads 
along the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It is built 
in symmetrical tiers, and resembles a pile of small 
rounded hats, one above another, the rims depending 
like eaves, and sheltering the body of the hill from 
rain. To estimate the amount of earth per acre 
raised from the water-line of the subsoil by white 



150 THE WHITE ANT 

ants would not in some districts be an impossible 
task ; and it would be found, probably, that the 
quantity at least equalled that manipulated annually 
in temperate regions by the earthworm. 

These mounds, however, are more than mere 
waste-heaps. Like the corresponding region under- 
ground, they are built into a meshwork of tunnels, 
galleries, and chambers, where the social interests of 
the community are attended to. The most spacious 
of these chambers, usually far underground, is very 
properly allocated to the head of the society, the 
queen. The queen-termite is a very rare insect, and 
as there are seldom more than one, or at most two, 
to a colony, and as the royal apartments are hidden 
far in the earth, few persons have ever seen a queen, 
and indeed most, if they did happen to come across 
it, from its very singular appearance, would refuse to 
believe that it had any connection with white ants. 
It possesses, indeed, the true termite head, but there 
the resemblance to the other members of the family 
stops, for the size of the head bears about the same 
proportion to the rest of the body as does the tuft 
on his Glengarry bonnet to a six-foot Highlander. 
The phenomenal corpulence of the royal body in the 
case of the queen-termite is possibly due in part to 
want of exercise, for once seated upon her throne 




^«/«W25 Si: • 



NEST OF THE WHITE ANT. 
i. Male. 2, 4, 5, Neuters. 3. Gravid Female. 



See / age 150. 



A THEORY *53 



she never stirs to the end of her days. She lies 
there, a large, loathsome, cylindrical package, two ot 
three inches long, in shape like a sausage, and as 
white as a bolster. Her one duty in life is to lay 
eggs, and it must be confessed she discharges her 
function with complete success, for in a single day 
her progeny often amounts to many thousands, and 
for months this enormous fecundity never slackens. 
The body increases slowly in size, and through the 
transparent skin the long folded ovary may be 
seen, with the eggs, impelled by a peristaltic motion, 
passing onward for delivery to the workers who are 
waiting to carry them to the nurseries where they 
are hatched. Assiduous attention, meantime, is paid 
to the queen by other workers, who feed her diligently, 
with much self-denial stuffing her with morsel after 
morsel from their own jaws. A guard of honour in 
the shape of a few of the larger soldier-ants is also 
in attendance as a last and almost unnecessary pre- 
caution. In addition, finally, to the soldiers, workers, 
and queen, the royal chamber has also one other 
inmate— the king. He is a very ordinary-looking 
insect, about the same size as the soldiers, but the 
arrangement of the parts of the head and body is 
widely different, and like the queen he is furnished 
with eyes. 



154 THE WHITE ANT 

Let me now attempt to show the way in which 
the work of the termites bears upon the natural 
agriculture and geology of the tropics. Looking at 
the question from the large point of view, the general 
fact to be noted is, that the soil of the tropics is in 
a state of perpetual motion. Instead of an upper 
crust, moistened to a paste by the autumn rains, and 
then baked hard as adamant in the sun ; and an 
under soil, hermetically sealed from the air and light, 
and inaccessible to all the natural manures derived 
from the decomposition of organic matters — these 
two layers being eternally fixed in their relation to 
one another — we have a slow and continued trans- 
ference of the layers always taking place. Not only 
to cover their depredations, but to dispose of the 
earth excavated from the underground galleries, the 
termites are constantly transporting the deeper and 
exhausted soils to the surface. Thus there is, so to 
speak, a constant circulation of earth in the tropics, 
a ploughing and harrowing, not furrow by furrow 
and clod by clod, but pellet by pellet and grain by 
grain. 

Some idea of the extent to which the underlying 
earth of the tropical forests is thus brought to the 
surface will have been gathered from the facts 
already described ; but no one who has not seen it 



A THEORY 155 



with his own eyes can appreciate the gigantic 
magnitude of the process. Occasionally one sees a 
whole trunk or branch, and sometimes almost an 
entire tree, so swathed in red mud that the bark is 
almost completely concealed, the tree looking as if it 
had been taken out bodily and dipped in some 
crystallising solution. It is not only one tree here 
and there that exhibits the work of the white ant, 
but in many places the whole forest is so coloured 
with dull red tunnels and patches as to give a 
distinct tone to the landscape — an effect which, at 
a little distance, reminds one of the abend-roth in 
a pine forest among the Alps. Some regions are 
naturally more favourable than others to the opera- 
tions of the termites, and to those who have only 
seen them at work in India or in the lower districts 
of Africa this statement may seem an exaggeration. 
But on one range of forest-clad hills on the great 
plateau between Lake Nyassa and Tanganyika I 
have walked for miles through trees, every one ot 
which, without exception, was ramified, more or less, 
with tunnels. The elevation of this locality was 
about 5000 feet above the sea, and the distance 
from the equator some g° ; but nowhere else have I 
seen a spot where the termites were so completely 
masters of the situation as here. If it is the case 



i 5 6 



THE WHITE ANT 



that in these, the most elevated regions of Central 
Africa, the termite colonies attain their maximum 
development, the fact is of much interest in connec- 
tion with the geological and agricultural function 
which they seem to serve ; for it is here precisely, 




WHITE ANT HILL 

before the rivers have gathered volume, that alluvium 
is most wanting ; it is here that the tiny headwaters 
of these same rivers collect the earth for subsequent 
distribution over the distant plains and coasts ; and 
though the white ant may itself have no power, in 



THE WHITE ANT 157 



the first instance, of creating soil, as a denuding and 
transporting agent its ministry can scarcely be 
exaggerated. If this is its function in the economy 
of nature, it is certainly clear that the insect to which 
this task is assigned is planted where, of all places, 
it can most effectively fulfil the end. 

The direct relation of the termites' work to 
denudation will still further appear if we try to 
imagine the effect upon these accumulations of earth- 
pellets and grains of an ordinary rainy season. For 
two or three months in the tropics, though intermit- 
tently, the rains lash the forests and soils with a fury 
such as we, fortunately, have little idea of. And 
though the earthworks, and especially the larger 
ant-hills, have marvellous resisting properties, they 
are not invulnerable, and must ultimately succumb 
to denuding agents. The tunnels, being only required 
for a temporary purpose, are made substantial enough 
only to last the occasion. And in spite of the 
natural glue which cements the pellets of earth 
together, the structure, as a whole, after a little 
exposure, becomes extremely friable, and crumbles 
to pieces at a touch. When the earth-tubes crumble 
into dust in the summer season the debris is scattered 
over the country by the wind, and in this way tends 
to increase and refresh the soil. During the rains, 



5$ 



THE WHITE ANT 



again, it is washed into the rivulets and borne away 
to fertilise with new alluvium the distant valleys, or 
carried downward to the ocean, where, along the coast 
line, it " sows the dust of continents to be." Hero- 
dotus, with equal poetic and scientific truth, describes 
Egypt as " the gift of the Nile." Possibly had he 
lived to-day he might have carried his vision farther 
back still, and referred some of it to the labours of 
the humble termites in the forest slopes about 
Victoria Nyanza. 




WHITE ANT HILLS. 



VII 
MIMICRY 

THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 



VII 

MIMICRY 

THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 

TV /T IMICRY is imposture in nature. Carlyle in 
^* his blackest visions of " shams and humbugs " 
among human kind never saw anything so finished 
in hypocrisy as the naturalist now finds in every 
tropical forest. There are to be seen creatures, not 
singly, but in tens of thousands, whose very appear- 
ance, down to the minutest spot and wrinkle, is an 
affront to truth, whose every attitude is a pose for a 
purpose, and whose whole life is a sustained lie. 
Before these masterpieces of deception the most in- 
genious of human impositions are vulgar and trans- 
parent. Fraud is not only the great rule of life in 
a tropical forest, but the one condition of it 

Although the extraordinary phenomena of mimicry 
are now pretty generally known to science, few 
workers have yet had the opportunity of studying 

M 



1 62 MIMICRY 



them in nature. But no study in natural history 
depends more upon observation in the field ; for 
while in the case of a few mimetic forms — the Heli- 
conidce, for example — the imitated form is also an 
insect, and the two specimens may be laid side by 
side in the cabinet at home, the great majority of 
mimetic insects are imitations of objects in the 
environment which cannot be brought into com- 
parison with them in the drawers of a museum. 
Besides this, it is not only the form but the behaviour 
of the mimetic insect, its whole habit and habitat, 
that have to be considered ; so that mere museum 
contributions to mimicry are almost useless without 
the amplest supplement from the field naturalist. I 
make no further apology, therefore, for transcribing 
here a few notes bearing upon this subject from 
journals written during a recent survey of a region 
in the heart of Africa — the Nyassa-Tanganyika 
plateau — which has not yet been described or visited 
by any naturalist. 

The preliminaries of the subject can be mastered 
in a moment even by the uninitiated, and I may 
therefore begin with a short preface on animal 
colouring in general. Mimicry depends on resem- 
blances between an animal and some other object in 
its environment of which it is a practical gain to the 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 163 

creature to be a more or less accurate copy. The 
resemblance may be to any object, animate or inani- 
mate. It may be restricted to colour, or it may 
extend to form, and even to habit ; but of these the 
first is by far the most important. 

Apart from sexual selection, colour in animals 
mainly serves two functions. It is either " protective " 
or " warning." The object of the first is to render 
the animal inconspicuous, the object of the second 
is the opposite — to make it conspicuous. Why it 
should be an object with some animals to be palpably 
exposed will be apparent from the following familiar 
instance of " warning " coloration. There are two 
great families of butterflies, the Danaidce and Acraiedce, 
which are inedible owing to the presence in their 
bodies of acrid and unwholesome juices. Now to 
swallow one of these creatures — and birds, monkeys, 
lizards, and spiders are very fond of butterflies — 
would be gratuitous. It would be disappointing to 
the eater, who would have to disgorge his prey im- 
mediately, and it would be an unnecessary sacrifice 
of the subject of the experiment. These butterflies, 
therefore, must have their disagreeableness in some 
way advertised, and so they dress up with exceptional 
eccentricity, distinguishing themselves by loud patterns 
and brilliant colourings, so that the bird, the monkey, 



i6 4 MIMICRY 



and the rest can take in the situation at a glance. 
These animated danger-signals float serenely about 
the forests with the utmost coolness in the broadest 
daylight, leisureliness, defiance, and self-complacency 
marking their every movement, while their duskier 
brethren have to hurry through the glades in terror 
of their lives. For the same reason, well-armed or 
stinging insects are always conspicuously ornamented 
with warning colours. The expense of eating a wasp, 
for instance, is too great to lead to a second invest- 
ment in the same insect, and wasps therefore have 
been rendered as showy as possible so that they may 
be at once seen and as carefully avoided. The same 
law applies to bees, dragonflies, and other gaudy 
forms ; and it may be taken as a rule that all gaily- 
coloured insects belong to one or other of these two 
classes : that is, that they are either bad eating or 
bad-stingers. Now the remarkable fact is that all 
these brilliant and unwholesome creatures are closely 
imitated in outward apparel by other creatures not 
themselves protected by acrid juices, but which thus 
share the same immunity. That these are cases of 
mimicry is certain from many considerations, not the 
least striking of which is that frequently one of the 
sexes is protectively coloured and not the other. 
The brilliant colouring of poisonous snakes is 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 165 

sometimes set down by naturalists to "warning," but 
the details of colouring among reptiles have never 
been thoroughly worked out. The difficulty suggests 
itself that if the vivid yellows and oranges of some 
snakes are meant to warn off dangerous animals, the 
same conspicuousness would warn off the animals on 
which the venomous forms prey. Thus, while being 
hunted, a showy skin might be of advantage to the 
snake ; in hunting it would be an equal disadvantage. 
But when one watches on the spot the manner in 
which snakes really do their hunting, it becomes 
probable that the colouring, vivid and peculiar as it 
is, in most cases is designed simply to aid conceal- 
ment. One of the most beautiful and ornate of all 
the tropical reptiles is the puff-adder. This animal, 
the bite of which is certain death, is from three to 
five feet long, and disproportionately thick, being in 
some parts almost as thick as the lower part of the 
thigh. The whole body is ornamented with strange 
devices in green, yellow, and black, and lying in a 
museum its glittering coils certainly form a most 
striking object. But in nature the puff-adder has a 
very different background. It is essentially a forest 
animal, its true habitat being among the fallen leaves 
in the deep shade of the trees by the banks of 
streams. Now in such a position, at the distance of 



166 MIMICRY 



a foot or two, its appearance so exactly resembles 
the forest bed as to be almost indistinguishable from 
it I was once just throwing myself down under a 
tree to rest when, stooping to clear the spot, I noticed 
a peculiar pattern among the leaves. I started back 
in horror to find a puff-adder of the largest size, its 
thick back only visible and its fangs within a few 
inches of my face as I stooped. It was lying con- 
cealed among fallen leaves so like itself that, but for 
the exceptional caution which in African travel 
becomes a habit, I should certainly have sat down 
upon it, and to sit down upon a puff-adder is to sit 
down for the last time. I think this coloration in 
the puff-adder is more than that of warning, and that 
this semi-somnolent attitude is not always the mere 
attitude of repose. This reptile lay lengthwise, con- 
cealed, all but a few inches, among the withered 
leaves. Now the peculiarity of the puff-adder is that 
it strikes backward. Lying on the ground, therefore, 
it commands as it were its whole rear, and the moment 
any part is touched, the head doubles backward with 
inconceivable swiftness, and the poison-fangs close 
upon their victim. The puff-adder in this way forms 
a sort of horrid trap set in the woods which may be 
altogether unperceived till it shuts with a sudden 
spring upon its prey. 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 167 

But that the main function of colouring is pro- 
tection may be decided from the simplest observation 
of animal life in any part of the world. Even among 
the larger animals, which one might suppose inde- 
pendent of subterfuge and whose appearance any- 
where but in their native haunts suggests a very 
opposite theory, the harmony of colour with environ- 
ment is always more or less striking. When we 
look, for instance, at the coat of a zebra with its 
thunder -and- lightning pattern of black and white 
stripes, we should think such a conspicuous object 
designed to court rather than to elude attention. 
But the effect in nature is just the opposite. The 
black and white somehow take away the sense of a 
solid body altogether ; the two colours seem to blend 
into the most inconspicuous gray, and at close quarters 
the effect is as of bars of light seen through the 
branches of shrubs. I have found myself in the 
forest gazing at what I supposed to be a solitary 
zebra, its presence betrayed by some motion due to 
my approach, and suddenly realised that I was sur- 
rounded by an entire herd which were all invisible 
until they moved. The motionlessness of wild game 
in the field when danger is near is well known ; and 
every hunter is aware of the difficulty of seeing even 
the largest animals though they are just standing in 



i68 MIMICRY 



front of him. The tiger, whose stripes are obviously 
meant to imitate the reeds of the jungle in which it 
lurks, is nowhere found in Africa ; but its beautiful 
cousin, the leopard, abounds in these forests, and its 
spotted pelt probably conveys the same sense of 
indistinctness as in the case of the zebra. The 
hippopotamus seems to find the deep water of the 
rivers — where it spends the greater portion of its 
time — a sufficient protection ; but the crocodile is 
marvellously concealed by its knotted mud-coloured 
hide, and it is often quite impossible to tell at a 
distance whether the objects lying along the river 
banks are alligators or fallen logs. 

But by far the most wonderful examples of pro- 
tective adjustments are found where the further 
disguise of form is added to that of colour, and to 
this only is the term mimicry strictly applicable. 
The pitch of intricate perfection to which mimicry 
has attained in an undisturbed and unglaciated 
country like Central Africa is so marvellous and 
incredible, that one almost hesitates to utter what 
his eyes have seen. Before going to Africa I was of 
course familiar with the accounts of mimetic insects 
to be found in the works of Bates, Belt, Wallace, and 
other naturalists ; but no description prepares one in 
the least for the surprise which awaits him when first 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 169 

he encounters these species in nature. My introduc- 
tion to them occurred on the borders of Lake Shirwa 
— one of the smaller and less known of the great 
African lakes — and I shall record the incident 
exactly as I find it in my notes. I had stopped 
one day among some tall dry grass to mark a 
reading of the aneroid, when one of my men 
suddenly shouted " Chirombo !" " Chirombo " means 
an inedible beast of any kind, and I turned round 
to see where the animal was. The native pointed 
straight at myself. I could see nothing, but he 
approached, and pointing close to a wisp of hay 
which had fallen upon my coat, repeated "Chirombo!" 
Believing that it must be some insect among the 
hay, I took it in my fingers, looked over it, and told 
him pointedly there was no " Chirombo " there. 
He smiled, and pointing again to the hay, exclaimed 
"Moio!" — "It's alive!" The hay itself was the 
Chirombo, I do not exaggerate when I say that 
that wisp of hay was no more like an insect than 
my aneroid barometer. I had mentally resolved 
never to be taken in by any of these mimetic frauds ; 
I was incredulous enough to suspect that the descrip- 
tions of Wallace and the others were somewhat 
highly coloured ; but I confess to have been com- 
pletely stultified and beaten by the very first mimetic 



[70 MIMICRY 



form I met. It was one of that very remarkable 
family the Phasmidcz, but surely nowhere else in 
nature could there be such another creature. Take 
two inches of dried yellow grass-stalk, such as one 
might pluck to run through the stem of a pipe ; 
then take six other pieces nearly as long and a 
quarter as thick ; bend each in the middle at any 
angle you like, stick them in three opposite pairs, 
and again at any angle you like, upon the first grass 
stalk, and you have my Chirombo. When you 
catch him, his limbs are twisted about at every angle, 
as if the whole were made of one long stalk of the 
most delicate grass, hinged in a dozen places, and 
then gently crushed up into a dishevelled heap. 
Having once assumed a position, by a wonderful 
instinct he never moves or varies one of his many 
angles by half a degree. The way this insect 
keeps up the delusion is indeed almost as wonderful 
as the mimicry itself; you may turn him about and 
over and over, but he is mere dried grass, and 
nothing will induce him to acknowledge the animal 
kingdom by the faintest suspicion of spontaneous 
movement. All the members of this family have 
this power of shamming death ; but how such emaci- 
ated and juiceless skeletons should ever presume to 
be alive is the real mystery. These Phasmidae look 



THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 171 

more like ghosts than living creatures, and so slim 
are they that, in trying to kill them for the collecting- 
box, the strongest squeeze between finger and thumb 
makes no more impression upon them than it would 
upon fine steel wire, and one has to . half-guillotine 
them against some hard substance before any little 
life they have is sacrificed to science. 

I examined after this many thousands of Phas- 
midae, Mantidae, and other mimetic forms, and there 
is certainly in nature no more curious or interesting 
study. These grass -stalk insects live exclusively 
among the long grass which occurs in patches all 
over the forests, and often reaches a height of eight 
or ten feet. During three-fourths of the year it is 
dried by the sun into a straw-yellow colour, and all 
the insects are painted to match. Although yellow 
is the ground tone of these grasses, they are varie- 
gated, and especially towards the latter half of the 
year, in two ways. They are either tinged here and 
there with red and brown, like the autumn colours 
at home, or they are streaked and spotted with black 
mould or other markings, painted by the finger of 
decay. All these appearances are closely imitated 
by insects. To complete the deception, some have 
the antennae developed to represent blades of grass, 
which are often from one to two inches in length, 



!72 MIMICRY 



and stick out from the end of the body, one on 
either side, like blades of grass at the end of a stalk. 
The favourite attitude of these insects is to clasp a 
grass-stalk, as if they were climbing a pole ; then 
the body is compressed against the stem and held in 
position by the two fore-limbs, which are extended 
in front so as to form one long line with the body, 
and so mixed up with the stalk as to be practically 
part of it. The four other legs stand out anyhow in 
rigid spikes, like forks from the grass, while the 
antennae are erected at the top, like blades coming 
off from a node, which the button-like head so well 
resembles. When one of these insects springs to a 
new stalk of grass it will at once all but vanish 
before your eyes. It remains there perfectly rigid, 
a component part of the grass itself, its long legs 
crooked and branched exactly like dried hay, the 
same in colour, the same in fineness, and quite 
defying detection. These blades, alike with limbs 
and body, are variously coloured according to season 
and habitat. When the grasses are tinged with 
autumn tints they are the same ; and the colours 
run through many shades, from the pure bright red, 
such as tips the fins of a perch, to the deeper claret 
colours or the tawny gold of port. But an even 
more singular fact remains to be noted. After the 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 173 

rainy season,, when the new grasses spring up with 
their vivid colour, these withered-grass insects seem 
all to disappear. Their colour now would be no 
protection to them, and their places are taken by 
others coloured as green as the new grass. Whether 
these are new insects or only the same in spring 
toilets I do not know, but I should think they are 
a different population altogether, the cycle of the 
former generation being, probably, complete with 
the end of summer. 

Besides the insects which imitate grass, another 
large class imitate twigs, sticks, and the smaller 
branches of shrubs. The commonest of these is a 
walking twig, three or four inches long, covered with 
bark apparently, and spotted all over with mould 
like the genuine branch. The imitation of bark 
here is one of the most perfect delusions in nature ; 
the delicate striation and the mould spots are repro- 
duced exactly, while the segmentation of the body 
represents node -intervals with wonderful accuracy. 
On finding one of these insects I have often cut a 
small branch from an adjoining tree and laid the 
two side by side for comparison ; and when both 
are partly concealed by the hands so as to show 
only the part of the insect's body which is free from 
limbs, it is impossible to tell the one from the other. 



174 MIMICRY 



The very joints of the legs in these forms are 
knobbed to represent nodes, and the characteristic 
attitudes of the insect are all such as to sustain the 
deception. 

A still more elaborate set of forms are those 
which represent leaves. These belong mostly to the 
Mantis and Locust tribes, and they are found in all 
forms, sizes, and colours, mimicking foliage at every 
stage of growth, maturity, and decay. Some have 
the leaf stamped on their broadened wing-cases in 
vivid green, with veins and midrib complete, and 
with curious expansions over the thorax and along 
all the limbs to imitate smaller leaves. I have 
again and again matched these forms in the forest, 
not only with the living leaf, but with crumpled, 
discoloured, and shrivelled specimens, and indeed 
the imitations of the crumpled autumn-leaf are even 
more numerous and impressive than those of the 
living form. Lichens, mosses, and fungi are also 
constantly taken as models by insects, and there is 
probably nothing in the vegetal kingdom, no knot, 
wart, nut, mould, scale, bract, thorn, or bark, which 
has not its living counterpart in some animal form. 
Most of the moths, beetles, weevils, and especially 
the larval forms, are more or less protected mime- 
tically ; and in fact almost the entire population of 



THE WA YS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 



175 



the tropics is guilty of personation in ways known 
or unknown. The lichen -mimicking insects even 
go the length of imitating holes, by means of 
mirror-like pools of black irregularly disposed on 




the back, or interrupting the otherwise dangerous 
symmetry of the fringed sides. The philosophy of 
these coal-black markings greatly puzzled me for a 
time. The first I saw was on a specimen of the 
singular and rare Harpax ocellaria, which had been 



176 MIMICRY 



thrown on the camp fire clinging to a lichen-covered 
log, and so well carried out was the illusion that 
even the natives were deceived till the culprit betrayed 
its quality by erecting its gauzy wings. 

But it would be tedious to recount further the 
divisive ways of these arch -deceivers, and I shall 
only refer to another mimetic form, which for cool 
Pharisaism takes the palm from every creeping or 
flying thing. I first saw this menteur a triple itage 
on the Tanganyika plateau. I had lain for a whole 
week without stirring from one spot — a boulder in 
the dried -up bed of a stream, for this is the only 
way to find out what really goes on in nature. A 
canopy of leaves arched overhead, the home of many 
birds, and the granite boulders of the dry stream 
bed, and all along the banks, were marked with their 
white droppings. One day I was startled to see one 
of these droppings move. It was a mere white 
splash upon the stone, and when I approached I saw 
I must be mistaken ; the thing was impossible ; and 
now it was perfectly motionless. But I certainly 
saw it move, so I bent down and touched it. It was 
an animal. Of course it was as dead as a stone the 
moment I touched it, but one soon knows these 
impostures, and I gave it a minute or two to become 
alive — hastily sketching it meantime in case it 



THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 177 

should vanish through the stone, for in that land of 
wonders one really never knows what will happen 
next. Here was a bird-dropping suddenly become 
alive and moving over a rock ; and now it was a 
bird-dropping again ; and yet, like Galileo, I protest 
that it moved. It would not come to, and I almost 
feared I might be mistaken after all, so I turned it 
over on its other side. Now should any sceptic 
persist that this was a bird-dropping I leave him to 
account for a bird-dropping with six legs, a head, 
and a segmented body. Righting the creature, 
which showed no sign of life through all this ordeal, 
I withdrew a few paces and watched developments. 
It lay motionless on the stone, no legs, no head, no 
feelers, nothing to be seen but a flat patch of white 
— just such a patch as you could make on the stone 
in a second with a piece of chalk. Presently it 
stirred, and the spot slowly sidled across the boulder 
until I caught the impostor and imprisoned him for 
my cabinet. I saw in all about a dozen of these 
insects after this. They are about half the size of a 
fourpenny-piece, slightly more oval than round, and 
as white as a snowflake. This whiteness is due to 
a number of little tufts of delicate down growing out 
from minute protuberances all over the back. It is 
a fringe of similar tufts round the side that gives the 

N 



i;8 MIMICRY 



irregular margin so suggestive of a splash ; and the 
under surface of the body has no protection at all. 
The limbs are mere threads, and the motion of the 
insect is slow and monotonous, with frequent pauses 
to impress surrounding nature with its moribund con- 
dition. Now unless this insect with this colour and 
habit were protectively coloured it simply would not 
have a chance to exist. It lies fearlessly exposed on 
the bare stones during the brightest hours of the 
tropical day, a time when almost every other animal 
is skulking out of sight. Lying upon all the stones 
round about are the genuine droppings of birds ; and 
when one sees the two together it is difficult to say 
whether one is most struck with the originality of 
the idea, or the extraordinary audacity with which 
the role is carried out. 1 

It will be apparent from these brief notes that 
mimicry is not merely an occasional or exceptional 
phenomenon, but an integral part of the economy of 
nature. It is not a chance relation between a few 



1 It is a considerable responsibility to be the sole witness 
to this comedy — though I saw it repeated a dozen times subse- 
quently — but fortunately for my veracity, I have since learned 
from Mr. Kirby of the British Museum that there is an English 
beetle, the Cionus Blattaria, the larval form of which " oper- 
ates ' in a precisely similar way. 



THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS 179 

objects, but a system so widely authorised that prob- 
ably the whole animal kingdom is more or less 
involved in it ; a system, moreover, which, in the 
hands of natural selection, must ever increase in 
intricacy and beauty. It may also be taken for 
granted that a scheme so widespread and so success- 
ful is based upon some sound utilitarian principle. 
That principle, I should say, was probably its economy. 
Nature does everything as simply as possible, and 
with the least expenditure of material. Now con- 
sider the enormous saving of muscle and nerve, of 
instinct and energy, secured by making an animal's 
lease of life to depend on passivity rather than 
activity. Instead of having to run away, the creature 
has simply to keep still ; instead of having to fight, 
it has but to hide. No armour is needed, no power- 
ful muscle, no expanse of wing. A few daubs of 
colour, a little modelling of thorax and abdomen, 
a deft turn of antennae and limb, and the thing is 
done. 

At the first revelation of all these smart hypocrisies 
one is inclined to brand the whole system as cowardly 
and false. And, however much the creatures impress 
you by their cleverness, you never quite get over the 
feeling that there is something underhand about it ; 
something questionable and morally unsound. The 



[80 MIMICRY 



evolutionist, also, is apt to charge mimetic species in 
general with neglecting the harmonious development 
of their physical framework, and by a cheap and 
ignoble subterfuge evading the appointed struggle 
for life. But is it so ? Are the aesthetic elements 
in nature so far below the mechanical ? Are colour 
and form, quietness and rest, so much less important 
than the specialisation of single function or excel- 
lence in the arts of war ? Is it nothing that, while 
in some animals the disguises tend to become more 
and more perfect, the faculties for penetrating them, 
in other animals, must continually increase in subtlety 
and power ? And, after all, if the least must be said, 
is it not better to be a live dog than a dead lion ? 



VIII 
A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 



VIII 
A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

TTROM the work of the various explorers who 
■*• have penetrated Africa, it is now certain that 
the interior of that Continent is occupied by a vast 
plateau from 4000 to 5000 feet above the level of 
the sea. In five separate regions — in the North- 
East, in Abyssinia, in the Masai country, on the 
Tanganyika plateau, and in the district inland from 
Benguela — this plateau attains a height of consider- 
ably over 5000 feet; while towards the coasts, 
throughout their entire length, both east and west, 
it falls with great uniformity to a lower plateau, 
with an elevation of from 1000 to 2000 feet. This 
lower plateau is succeeded, also with much uniformity 
along both coast lines, by littoral and deltoid plains, 
with an average breadth from the sea of about 150 
miles. 

The section which I am about to describe, 
entering Africa at the Zambesi and penetrating 



[8 « A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 



inwards to the Tanganyika plateau, traverses each 
of these regions in turn— the coast-belt, the lower 
fringing table-land, the great general plateau of the 
country, and the third or highest elevation of the 
Tanganyika table-land. To deal thoroughly with so 
vast a region in the course of a single exploration 
is out of the question ; and I only indicate here a 
few of the rough results of what was no more than a 
brief and hasty reconnaissance. 

The first and only geological feature to break the 
monotony of mangrove-swamp and low grass plain 
of the coast-belt is the debris of an ancient coral- 
reef, studded with sponges and other organisms. 
This reef is exposed on the Qua-qua River, a little 
above Mogurrumba, and about fifty miles from the 
sea. It is of small extent, at no great height above 
the present sea -level, and, taken alone, can only 
argue for a very inconsiderable elevation of the coast 
region. Some twenty miles farther inland, and still 
only a few yards above sea-level, an inconspicuous 
elevation appears, consisting of sedimentary rocks. 
This belt is traceable for some distance, both north 
and south, and a poor section may be found in the 
Zambesi River, a few miles above the grave of Mrs. 
Livingstone at Shupanga. The rocks in question, 
which are only visible when the Zambesi is very low, 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 185 

consist of a few thin beds of red and yellow sand- 
stones, with intercalated marly sandstones and fine 
conglomerates. Sedimentary rocks, in a somewhat 
similar relation, are found at least as far north as 
Mombassa, above Zanzibar, and as far south as the 
Cape ; and it seems probable that the whole of the 
plateau of the interior is fringed by this narrow belt. 
No organic remains have been found in this series 
north of Natal, but the fossils of the Cape beds may 
shed some light on its horizon. Associated probably 
with these rocks are the great beds of coal which are 
known to exist some distance up the river in the 
neighbourhood of Tette. 

A short distance above the junction of the River 
Shire with the Zambesi the first hills of the plateau 
begin almost abruptly. They occur in irregular 
isolated masses, mostly of the saddle -back order, 
and varying in height from 100 or 200 to 2000 
feet. Those I examined consisted entirely of a very 
white quartzite — the only quartzite, I may say, I 
ever saw in East Central Africa. At the foot of the 
most prominent of those hills — that of Morumballa — 
a hot -spring bubbles up, which Livingstone has 
already described in his " Zambesi." Hot-springs 
are not uncommon in other parts of the Continent, 
and several are to be found on the shores of Lake 



i86 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

Nyassa. These are all of the simplest type, and 
although the temperature is high they leave no 
deposit anywhere to indicate their chemical char- 
acter. 

Two or three days' journey north and west of 
Morumballa, among the distant hills which border 
the valley of the Shire\ Livingstone marks a spot in 
his sketch-map where coal is to be found. After 
examining the neighbourhood with some care, and 
cross-examining the native tribes, I conclude that 
Livingstone must, in this instance, have been either 
mistaken or misinformed. A black rock certainly 
occurs at the locality named, but after securing 
specimens of this as well as of all the dark-coloured 
rocks in the vicinity, I found them to be, without 
exception, members of the igneous class. One very 
dark diorite was probably the rock which, on a 
distant view, had been mistaken for coal, for none of 
the natives along the whole length of the lower 
Shire had ever heard of " a black rock which burned." 
Coal, however, as already mentioned, does certainly 
occur farther inland on the Zambesi ; while, farther 
south, the Natal and Transvaal coalfields are now 
well known. 

While speaking of coal I may best refer here to 
a small coal-bed associated with an apparently differ- 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 187 

ent series of rocks, and of special interest from its 
occurrence in the far interior of the country. On 
the western shore of Lake Nyassa, about io° south 
latitude, coal was reported a few years ago by a 
solitary explorer, who penetrated that region pro- 
specting for gold in the wake of Livingstone. The 
importance of such a discovery — a coal-seam on the 
borders of one of the great inland seas of Africa — 
cannot be over-estimated ; and the late Mr. James 
Stewart, C.E., who has done such important work for 
the geography of Africa, made a special examination 
of the spot. From his report to the Royal Geogra- 
phical Society, I extract the following reference : — 

"On the 29th we marched northwards along the 
coast, reaching, after three miles, the stream in which 
is the coal discovered by Mr. Rhodes. The coal lies 
in a clay bank, tilted up at an angle of 45 , dip west. 
It is laid bare over only some 30 feet, and is about 
7 feet thick. It hardly looks as if it were in its 
original bed. The coal is broken and thrown about 
as if it had been brought down by a landslip, and 
traces of clay are found in the interstices. Yet the 
bed is compact, and full of good coal. I traced it 
along the hillside for some 200 yards, and found it 
cropping out on the surface here and there. It is 
500 feet above the lake-level, and about a mile and 



(88 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

a half from the shore. I lit a good fire with it, which 
burned up strongly. The coal softened and threw 
out gas bubbles, but gave no gas-jets. It caked 
slightly, but not so as to impede its burning." — Pro- 
ceedings, vol. iii. No. 5, p. 264. 

I examined this section pretty carefully, and fear 
I must differ slightly from Mr. Stewart in his geo- 
logical and economical view of the formation. The 
7 -foot seam described by Stewart is certainly a 
deception, the seam being really composed of a series 
of thin beds of alternately carbonaceous and argilla- 
ceous matter, few of the lavers of coal being more 
than an inch in thickness. With some of the most 
carefully selected specimens I lit a fire, but with 
disappointing results. Combustion was slow, and 
without flame. Although there were what can only 
be called films of really good coal here and there, 
the mineral, on the whole, seemed of inferior 
quality, and useless as a steam-coal. From the 
general indications of the locality I should judge 
that the coal existed only in limited quantity, while 
the position of the bed at the top of a rocky gorge 
renders the deposit all but inaccessible. On the 
whole, therefore, the Lake Nyassa coal, so far as 
opened up at present, can scarcely be regarded as 
having any great economical importance, although 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 189 

the geological interest of such a mineral in this 
region is considerable. Sections of the coal have 
already been prepared for the microscope, and Dr. 
Carruthers of the British Museum has identified the 
macrospores of Lycopodaceous plants, which are 
identical with similar organisms found in the coal- 
fields of England. 

The Geology of the great African plateaux, 
so far as my section from the Lower Shire* to the 
Tanganyika plateau is any indication of their general 
structure, is of such simplicity that it may almost be 
dismissed in a sentence. The whole country from 
the Shire river, a hundred miles above its junction 
with the Zambesi, embracing the lower and higher 
central plateaux, the whole Shire* Highlands from 
the river to the westward shores of Lake Shirwa, 
the three hundred miles of rocky coast fringing the 
western shore of Lake Nyassa, the plateau between 
Nyassa and Tanganyika for at least half its length 
— with one unimportant interruption — consists solely 
of # granite and gneiss. The character and texture of 
this rock persist with remarkable uniformity through- 
out this immense region. The granite, an ordinary 
gray granite, composed of white rarely pink orthoclase 
felspar, the mica of the biotitic or magnesian variety, 
rarely muscovite, and neither fine nor coarse in 



190 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

texture ; the gneiss, the same rock foliated. Of the 
relation of these gneissose and granitic rocks to one 
another I was unable to discover any law. Some- 
times the gneiss would persist over a large area, 
sometimes the granite ; while frequently the two 
would alternate perplexingly within a limited area. 
Mr. Joseph Thomson's section, drawn inland from 
Zanzibar and joining mine at the northern end of 
Lake Nyassa, and thence onwards by a more easterly 
route towards Tanganyika, reveals a somewhat similar 
petrographical structure ; and, from scattered refer- 
ences in the journals of other explorers, it is plain 
that this gneisso-granitic formation occupies a very 
large area in the interior of the African Continent. 
Associated minerals with these rocks, as far as a 
very general survey indicated, were all but wholly 
wanting. At Zomba, on the Shire* Highlands, a little 
tourmaline occurs, but of the precious metals I could 
find no trace. Veins of any kind are also rare ; and 
even pegmatite I encountered in only one instance. 
Intrusive dykes throughout the whole area were like- 
wise absent except in a single district. This district 
lies towards the southern border of the Shire* High- 
lands, immediately where the plateau rises from the 
river, and there the dykes occur pretty numerously. 
They are seldom more than a few feet in breadth 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 191 

and consist of ordinary dolerite or basalt. The black 
rock on the Lower 3hire\ already mentioned in con- 
nection with Livingstone's supposed discovery of coal, 
may possibly be one of these dykes ; but that there 
is any considerable development of igneous rocks in 
this immediate locality I should doubt Farther up 
the Zambesi, however, coulees of basalt are met 
with at more than one place, conspicuously in the 
neighbourhood of the Victoria Fails. The only 
distinct trace of volcanic action throughout my route 
appeared towards the extreme northern end of Lake 
Nyassa. One is warned beforehand by occasional 
specimens of pumice lying about the lake shore as 
one travels north ; but it is not till the extreme end 
of the lake is reached that the source is discovered in 
the series of low volcanic cones which Thomson has 
already described in this locality. The development 
is apparently local, and the origin of the cones 
probably comparatively recent. 

Apart from this local development of igneous 
rocks at the north end of Lake Nyassa, the only 
other break in the granitic series throughout the area 
traversed by my line of march occurs near the native 
village of Karonga, on Lake Nyassa. About a dozen 
miles from the north-western lake shore on the route 
to Tanganyika, after following the Rukuru river 



192 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

through a defile of granite rocks, I came, to my 
great surprise, upon a well-marked series of stratified 
beds. At a bend in the river a fine section is 
exposed. They lie thrown against the granitic rocks, 
which here show signs of disturbance, and consist of 
thin beds of very fine light-gray sandstone, and blue 
and gray shales, with an occasional band of gray 
limestone. By camping at the spot for some days, 
and working patiently, I was rewarded with the dis- 
covery of fossils. This is, of course, the main interest 
of these beds, — for these are, I believe, the only 
fossils that have ever been found in Central Africa. 
The shale, naturally, yielded the most productive 
results, one layer especially being one mass of small 
Lamellibranchiata. Though so numerous, these fossils 
are confined to a single species of the Tellinidae, a 
family abundantly represented in tropical seas at the 
present time, and dating back as far as the Oolite. 
Vegetable remains are feebly represented by a few 
reeds and grasses. Fish -scales abound ; but I was 
only able, and that after much labour, to unearth 
two or three imperfect specimens of the fishes them- 
selves. These have been put into the accomplished 
hands of Dr. Traquair of Edinburgh, who has been 
kind enough to furnish the following account of 
them : — 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 193 

Edinburgh, 2 3d April 1888. 

Dear Professor Drummond — I have carefully 
examined the six specimens of fossil fish -remains from 
Central Africa, which you submitted to me, and though I 
certainly would have wished them to have been less frag- 
mentary, I shall do my best to give an opinion upon them. 

No. 1, the largest, is the hinder portion of a fish of 
moderate size, showing not only scales, but also the remains 
of the dorsal, anal, and caudal fins. The caudal is strongly 
heterocercal, and was probably deeply bifurcated, but the 
rays of the lower lobe are very badly preserved : only the 
posterior parts of the dorsal and anal are seen, nearly 
opposite each other, and composed of fine, closely placed, 
and closely articulated rays. The scales, displaced and 
jumbled up, are osseous, thick, and rhomboidal, with a 
strong blunt carina on the attached surface, while the 
exposed part of the external surface is covered with ganoine, 
and ornamented with rather sparsely scattered pits and 
punctures. 

Belonging to the Order Ganoidei, this fish is with equal 
certainty referable to the family Palaeoniscidae, but its genus 
is more a matter of doubt owing to the fragmentary nature 
of the specimen. Judging from the form and thickness 
of the scales, I should be inclined to refer it to Acrolepts, 
were it not that the dorsal and anal fins seem so close to 
the tail, and so nearly opposite each other ; here, however, 
it may be remarked that the disturbed state of the scales 
affords room for the possibility that the original relations 
of the parts may not be perfectly preserved. I have, 
however, no doubt that, as a species^ it is new; and as 
you have been the first to bring fossil fishes from those 
regions of Central Africa, you will perhaps allow me to 
name it Acrolepis (?) Drummondi. 





194 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

No. 2 is a piece of cream-coloured limestone, with 
numerous minute, scattered, rhombic, striated, ganoid 
scales, which I cannot venture to name, though I believe 
them to be palaeoniscid. Associated with these is a small 
portion of the margin ot a jaw, with numerous minute 
sharp conical teeth. But also lying among these minuter 
relics is a scale of a much larger size, and clearly belonging 
to another fish. It measures \ inch in height by the same 
in breadth \ its shape is rhomboidal, having an extensive 
anterior covered area, and a strong articular spine project- 
ing from the upper margin. The free surface is brilliantly 
ganoid, and marked with furrows separating feeble ridges, 
which pass rather obliquely downwards and backwards 
across the scale, and terminate in eight sharp denticulations 
of the hinder margin. A little way off is the impression 
of the attached surface of a similar scale, and there are 
also two interspinous bones, probably belonging to the 
same fish. 

This is probably also a palaeoniscid scale, resembling 
in shape those of Acrolepis, but it is rather thinner than 
is usually the case in this genus. It has also considerable 
resemblance to some of those scales from the European 
Trias, named by Agassiz Gyrohpis. Though it may be 
rather venturesome to name a species from such slender 
material, nevertheless we may, provisionally at least, re- 
cognise the scale as Acrolepis (?) Africanus. 

Nos. 3 and 4 are small pieces of the same limestone, 
covered with the minute striated palaeoniscid scales referred 
to above. 

No. 5 is a piece of gray micaceous shale, with scales 
of yet a fourth species of palaeoniscid fish. One con- 
spicuous scale unfortunately, like all the rest, seen only 
from the attached surface, is \ inch in height by nearly \ 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 195 

in breadth ; it is tolerably rectangular in . shape, having a 
well-developed articular spine and fossette. Part of the 
scale is broken away at the anterior margin, the impression 
brought into view showing that the covered area is narrow, 
and indicating that the free surface is striated with rather 
sharp ridges passing obliquely across the scale. The 
posterior margin is finely denticulated. 

Though this scale is in my opinion specifically, and 
possibly generically, distinct from those previously named, 
the outer surface not being properly displayed renders it 
impossible to give a sufficient diagnosis. 

No. 6 is a piece of the same shale, having the clavicle 
of a small palaeoniscid fish, which it is, however, impossible 
to name. — I am, yours faithfully, 

R. H. Traquair. 

These fossiliferous beds seem to occupy a com- 
paratively limited area, and have a very high dip in 
a south-easterly direction. At the spot where my 
observations were taken they did not extend over 
more than half a mile of country, but it is possible 
that the formation may persist for a long distance in 
other directions. Indeed, I traced it for some miles 
in the direction in which, some fifty or sixty miles 
off, lay the coal already described, and to which it 
may possibly be related. 

With one or two general remarks upon surface 
geology and physical geography I bring this note to 
a close. First, regarding the Lakes Nyassa and 



196 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

Shirwa, — there is distinct evidence, and especially in 
the case of the latter, that they have formerly occu- 
pied a considerably larger area than at present. 
Shirwa is an extremely shallow lake ; though the 
eastern and southern shores are mountainous it is 
suggestive rather of an immense bog than of a deep 
inland sea. For many miles before reaching the 
shore there are signs that one is traversing the site 
of a former and larger Shirwa, which may possibly 
at one time have been actually connected with the 
lower extremity of Lake Nyassa. To substantiate 
this conclusion, however, will require more detailed 
examination of the Shire Highlands than I was able 
to give. The peculiarity of Shirwa is that the water 
is brackish to the taste, while that of Nyassa and 
of the other Central African lakes, with the excep- 
tion of Lake Leopold, is fresh. The shallowness 
of Shirwa, and the precariousness of its outlet through 
Lake Cheuta to the Lujenda, amply account for this 
difference ; for the narrow waters of Nyassa and 
Tanganyika are thoroughly drained and profoundly 
deep. 

That Lake Nyassa is also slowly drying up is 
evident from the most superficial examination of its 
southern end. There it has already left behind a 
smaller lake — Lake Pomalombe — a considerable ex- 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 197 

panse of water, through which the Shire" passes a few 
miles after emerging from Lake Nyassa, but already so 
shallow that nowhere in the dry season does the depth 
exceed three fathoms. If the silting up of this lake 
continues for a few years it will render this sheet of 
water, which commands the entrance to Lake Nyassa, 
totally unnavigable, and thus close the magnificent 
water -highway at present open, with a portage of 
seventy miles, from the top of Lake Nyassa to the 
Indian Ocean at the mouth of the Zambesi. 

Regarding the interesting question of the origin 
of Lake Nyassa and its great sister- lakes in the 
heart of Africa — the Victoria and Albert Nyanza 
and Tanganyika- — I do not presume to speak. No 
follower of Ramsay in his theory of the glacial 
origin of lakes could desire a more perfect example 
of a rock-basin than that of Lake Nyassa. It is a 
gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, three hundred 
miles in length, nowhere over fifty miles in breadth, 
and sixteen hundred feet above the level of the sea, 
the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes 
almost sheer above it, to a farther height of one, 
two, and three thousand feet. The high Tangan- 
yika plateau borders it on the northern shore, and 
the greatest depth is precisely where the glacial 
theory would demand, namely, towards the upper 



198 A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 

portion of the lake. On the other hand, the physical 
geology of the country in which these other lakes 
are situated, as well as several features connected 
with Lake Nyassa itseli, lend no countenance to 
such a view ; and probably the suggestion of Mur- 
chison and other geologists is correct, that all these 
lakes, colossal though they still are, are the rem- 
nants of a much vaster expanse of water which once 
stretched over Central Africa. 

The only other point to which I need allude is 
the subject of glaciation itself. And I refer to this 
pointedly, because I have lately encountered allu- 
sions, and in quarters entitling them to respect, to 
the presence of glacial phenomena in the Central 
Lake district of Africa. I confess that my observa- 
tions have failed to confirm these suggestions. It 
has been my lot to have had perhaps exceptional 
opportunities of studying the phenomena of glacia- 
tion in Europe and Northern America, and I have 
been unable to detect anywhere in the interior oi 
Africa a solitary indication of glacial action. In 
Kaffirland, far to the south, there are features which 
one would almost unhesitatingly refer to glaciation ; 
but in East Central Africa not a vestige of boulder- 
clay, nor moraine matter, nor striae, nor glaciated 
surface, nor outline, is anywhere traceable. One 



A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH 199 

would be curious to know to what extent the flora 
and fauna of the inland plateau confirm or contradict 
this negative evidence against the glaciation of this 
region. 

Finally, the thing about the geology of Africa 
that strikes one as especially significant is, that 
throughout this vast area, just opening up to science, 
there is nothing new — no unknown force at work ; 
no rock strange to the petrographer ; no pause in 
denudation ; no formation, texture, or structure to 
put the law of continuity to confusion. Rapid 
radiation, certainly, replaces the effects of frost in 
northern ianas — and the enormous denudation due 
to this cause is a most striking feature of tropical 
geology. The labours of the worm, again, in trans- 
porting soil in temperate climates are undertaken 
by the termite ; but here, as elsewhere, every, fresh 
investigation tends to establish more and ' more the 
oneness and simplicity of Nature. 




IX 



A POLITICAL WARNING 



IX 

A POLITICAL WARNING 

TTTHEN I reached the coast to embark for 
* * England after my wanderings in the interior, 
the Portuguese authorities at Quilimane presented 
me with various official documents, which I was told 
I must acknowledge with signatures and money 
before being permitted to leave Africa. Having 
already had to pay certain moneys to Portugal to 
get into this country, it was a shock to find that I 
had also to pay to get out ; but, as no tax could be 
considered excessive that would facilitate one's leaving 
even the least of the Portuguese East African colonies, 
I cheerfully counted out the price of my release. 
Before completing the conveyance, however, my eye 
fell on six words prominently endorsed on one of 
the documents, which instantly tightened my purse- 
strings. The words were, " Tax FOR RESIDING IN 
the Interior" — so much. Now a day or two 
spent in waiting for a steamer could scarcely be 



204 A POLITICAL WARNING 

construed into residence, nor could a strip of coast- 
line with propriety be termed the interior, so I 
ventured to point out the irrelevancy to the Portu- 
guese official. Waiving the merely philological 
question of residence, he went at once to the root 
of the matter by informing me that the Portuguese 
definition of the word Interior differed materially 
from that of England. The Interior, he said, com- 
prised the whole of Africa inland from the coast- 
province of Mozambique, and included, among other 
and larger possessions, the trifling territories of the 
Upper Shire, the Shire Highlands, Lake Shirwa, and 
Lake Nyassa. These last, he assured me, belonged 
to Portugal, and it became me, having therein shared 
the protection of that ancient flag, to acknowledge the 
obligation to the extent of so many hundred Reis. 

Though not unprepared for this assumption, the 
idea of enforcing it by demanding tribute was so 
great a novelty that, before discharging my supposed 
liabilities, I humbly asked information on the follow- 
ing points : — i . Did the region described really 
belong to Portugal ? 2. When and where was this 
claim recognised by England directly or indirectly ? 
3. Where in the Interior, as thus defined, was the 
Portuguese flag to be found ? And 4. What pro- 
tection had it ever given to me or to any other 



A POLITICAL WARNING 205 

European ? The replies to these queries being 
evasive, I took it upon myself to correct the history, 
the geography, and the politics of the throng of 
Government officials who now joined the sederunt 
by the following statement of facts : — 1. The region 
described did not belong to Portugal. 2. Its 
sovereignty had never been in any way acknow- 
ledged by England. 3. The Portuguese flag was 
nowhere to be found there, and never had been 
there. 4. Not one solitary Portuguese up to that time 
had ever even set foot in the country — except one 
man who was brought in for a few weeks under 
English auspices ; so that no protection had ever 
been given, or could possibly be given, to me or to 
any one else. These statements were received in 
silence, and after much running to and fro among 
the officials the representative of John Bull, instead 
of being dragged to prison, and his rifle — his only 
real escort through Nyassa-land — poinded to pay for 
his imaginary protection, found himself bowed off 
the premises with a discharge in full of his debt to 
Portugal, and the unpaid tax-paper still in his pocket. 
I recall this incident to introduce in all serious- 
ness the question interesting so many at the present 
moment as to the title-deeds of Equatorial Africa. 
Why Africa should not belong to the Africans I have 



206 A POLITICAL WARNING 

never quite been able to see, but since this Continent 
is being rapidly partitioned out among the various 
European States, it is well, even in the African 
interest, to inquire into the nature and validity of 
these claims. The map which will be found at the 
beginning of this volume will enable those interested 
to see the present situation at a glance, and I shall 
only further emphasise one or two points of immedi- 
ate practical importance. 

The connection of Portugal with Africa is an 
old, and — at least it was at first — an honourable one. 
The voyages of the Portuguese were the first to 
enrich geography with a knowledge of the African 
coasts, and so early as 1497 they took possession of 
the eastern shore by founding the colony of Mozam- 
bique. This rule, however, though nominally extend- 
ing from Delagoa Bay to as far north as Cape 
Delgado, was confined to two or three isolated 
points, and nowhere, except on the Zambesi, affected 
more than the mere fringe of land bordering the 
Indian Ocean. On the Zambesi the Portuguese 
established stations at Senna, Tette, and Zumbo, 
which were used, though on the most limited scale, 
as missionary and trading centres ; but these are at 
present all but abandoned and in the last stages of 
decrepitude. The right of Portugal to the lower 



A POLITICAL WARNING 207 

regions of the Zambesi, notwithstanding its entire 
failure to colonise in and govern the country, can 
never be disputed by any European Power, though 
the Landeens, or Zulus, who occupy the southern 
bank, not only refuse to acknowledge the claim but 
exact an annual tribute from the Portuguese for their 
occupation of the district. 

No one has ever attempted to define how far 
inland the Portuguese claim, founded on coast- 
possession, is to be considered good ; but that it 
cannot include the regions north of the Zambesi — 
the Shire Highlands and Lake Nyassa — is self- 
evident. These regions were discovered and explored 
by Livingstone. They have been occupied since his 
time exclusively by British subjects, and colonised 
exclusively with British capital. The claim of Eng- 
land, therefore — though nothing but a moral claim 
has ever been made — is founded on the double right 
of discovery and occupation ; and if it were a ques- 
tion of treaty with, the natives, it might possibly be 
found on private inquiry that a precaution so obvious 
had not been forgotten by those most nearly inter- 
ested. On the other hand, no treaties exist with 
Portugal ; there is not a single Portuguese in the 
country, and until the other day no Portuguese had 
even seen it. The Portuguese boundary -line has 



208 A POLITICAL WARNING 

always stopped at the confluence with the Shire" of 
the river Ruo, and the political barrier erected there 
by Chipitula and the river Chiefs has been main- 
tained so rigidly that no subject of Portugal was ever 
allowed to pass it from the south. Instead, there- 
fore, of possessing the Shire Highlands, that is the 
region of all others from which the Portuguese have 
been most carefully excluded. 

The reason for this enforced exclusion is not far 
to seek. At first the Portuguese had too much to 
do in keeping their always precarious foothold on 
the banks of the Zambesi to think of the country 
that lay beyond ; and when their eyes were at last 
turned towards it by the successes of the English, 
the detestation in which they were by this time held 
by the natives — the inevitable result of long years of 
tyranny and mismanagement — made it impossible 
for them to extend an influence which was known to 
be disastrous to every native right. Had the Portu- 
guese done well by the piece of Africa of which 
they already assumed the stewardship, no one now 
would dispute their claim to as much of the country 
as they could wisely use. But when even the natives 
have had to rise and by force of arms prevent their 
expansion, it is impossible that they should be 
allowed to overflow into the Highland country — 



A POLITICAL WARNING 209 

much iess to claim it — now that England, by pacific 
colonisation and missionary work, holds the key to 
the hearts and hands of its peoples. By every moral 
consideration the Portuguese have themselves for- 
feited the permission to trespass farther in Equa- 
torial Africa. They have done nothing for the 
people since the day they set foot in it. They have 
never discouraged, but rather connived at, the slave- 
trade ; Livingstone himself took the servant of the 
Governor of Tette red-handed at the head of a large 
slave-gang. They have been at perpetual feud with 
the native tribes. They have taught them to drink. 
Their missions have failed. Their colonisation is 
not even a name. With such a record in the past, 
no pressure surely can be required to make the 
Government of England stand firm in its repudia- 
tion of a claim which, were it acknowledged, would 
destroy the last hope for East Central Africa. 

England's stake in this country is immeasurably 
greater than any statistics can represent, but a 
rough estimate of the tangible English interest will 
show the necessity of the British Government doing 
its utmost at least to conserve what is already there. 

The Established Church of Scotland has three 
ordained missionaries in the Shire Highlands, one 
medical man, a male and a female teacher, a 

P 



A POLITICAL WARNING 



carpenter, a gardener, and other European and 
many native agents. The Free Church of Scotland 
on Lake Nyassa has four ordained missionaries — 
three of whom are doctors — several teachers and 
artizans, and many native catechists. The Univer- 
sities Mission possesses a steamer on Lake Nyassa, 
and several missionary agents ; while the African 
Lakes Company, as already mentioned, has steamers 
both on the Shire and Lake Nyassa, with twelve 
trading stations established at intervals throughout 
the country, and manned by twenty-five European 
agents. All these various agencies, and that of the 
brothers Buchanan at Zomba, are well equipped 
with buildings, implements, roads, plantations, and 
gardens ; and the whole represents a capital expend- 
iture of not less than .£180,000. The well-known 
editor of Livingstone's Journals, the Rev. Horace 
Waller, thus sums up his account of these English 
enterprises in his Title- Deeds to Nyassa- Land : 
" Dotted here and there, from the mangrove swamps 
at the Kongone mouth of the Zambesi to the farthest 
extremity of Lake Nyassa, we pass the graves of 
naval officers, of brave ladies, of a missionary bishop, 
of clergymen, Foreign Office representatives, doctors, 
scientific men, engineers, and mechanics. All these 
were our countrymen : they lie in glorious graves ; 



A POLITICAL WARNING 211 

their careers have been foundation-stones, and 
already the edifice rises. British mission stations 
are working at high pressure on the Shire* Highlands, 
and under various auspices, not only upon the shores 
of Lake Nyassa, but on its islands also, and by 
desperate choice as it were, in the towns of the 
devastating hordes who live on the plateaux on 
either side of the lake. Numbers of native Christians 
owe their knowledge of the common faith to these 
efforts ; scores of future chiefs are being instructed 
in the schools, spread over hundreds of miles ; planta- 
tions are being mapped out ; commerce is developing 
by sure and steady steps ; a vigorous company is 
showing to tribes and nations that there are more 
valuable commodities in their land than their sons 
and daughters." This is the vision which Living- 
stone saw, when, in the last years of his life, he 
pleaded with his fellow-countrymen to follow him 
into Africa. " I have opened the door," he said, u I 
leave it to you to see that no one closes it after me." 
The urgency of the question of Portuguese as 
against British supremacy in Equatorial Africa must 
not blind us, however, to another and scarcely less 
important point — the general European, and espe- 
cially the recent German, invasion of Africa. The 
Germans are good, though impecunious colonists, 



A POLITICAL WARNING 



but it cannot be said that they or any of the other 
European nations are as alive to the moral responsi- 
bilities of administration among native tribes as 
England would desire. And though they are all 
freely entitled to whatever lands in Africa they may 
legitimately secure, it is advisable for all concerned 
that these acquisitions should be clearly defined and 
established in international law, in order that the 
various Powers, the various trading-companies, and 
the various missions, may know exactly where they 
stand. The almost hopeless entanglement of the 
Foreign Powers in Africa at present may be seen 
from the following political " section," which re- 
presents the order of occupation along the Atlantic 
seaboard from opposite Gibraltar to the Cape : — 

POLITICAL "SECTION" OF WESTERN AFRICA 



Spain 






Morocco. 


France 




jj 


Spain 




Opposite the Canaries. 


France 






French Senegambia. 


Britain 






British „ 


France 






French „ 


Britain 






British „ 


Portugal 






Portuguese „ 


France 








Britain 






Sierra Leone. 


Liberia 






Republic of Liberia. 


France 






Gold Coast. 



A POLITICAL WARNING 



2i3 



England 


. Gold Coast. 


France 


Dahomey. 


Unappropriated 


• >> 


England 


Niger. 


Germany . 


Cameroons. 


French 


French Congo. 


Portuguese . 


Portuguese Congo. 


International 


Congo. 


Portuguese . 


Angola. 


Portuguese 


Benguela. 


Germany . 


Angra Pequena. 


England 


Walvisch Bay. 


Germany . 


Orange River. 


England 


Cape of Good Hope. 



These several possessions on the western coast 
have at least the advantage of being to some extent 
defined, but those on the east, and especially as 
regards their inland limits, are in a complete state 
of chaos. It seems hopeless to propose it, but what 
is really required is an International Conference 
to overhaul title - deeds, adjust boundary - lines, 
delimit territories, mark off states, protectorates, 
lands held by companies, and spheres of influence. 
England's interest in this must be largely a moral 
one. Her ambitions in the matter of new territories 
are long ago satisfied. But there will be certain 
conflict some day if the portioning of Africa is not 
more closely watched than it is at present. 



214 A POLITICAL WARNING 

As an example of the complacent way in which 
vast tracts in Africa are being appropriated, glance 
for a moment at the recent inroads of the Germans. 
On the faith of private treaties, and of an agree- 
ment with Portugal, Germany has recently staked 
off a region in East Central Africa stretching from 
the boundaries of the Congo Free State to the 
Indian Ocean, and embracing an area considerably 
larger than the German Empire. To a portion only 
of this region — the boundaries of which, contrasted 
with that arbitrarily claimed in addition, will be 
apparent from a comparison of the maps — have the 
Germans procured a title ; and the steps by which 
this has been attained afford an admirable illustra- 
tion of modern methods of land-transfer in Africa. 
What happened was this : — 

Four or five years ago Dr. Karl Peters concluded 
treaties with the native chiefs of Useguha, Ukami, 
Nguru and Usagara, by which he acquired these 
territories for the Society for German Colonisation. 
The late Sultan of Zanzibar attempted to remon- 
strate, but meantime an imperial " Schutzbrief " had 
been secured from Berlin, and a German fleet arrived 
at Zanzibar prepared to enforce it. Britain appealed 
to Germany on the subject, and a Delimitation 
Commission was appointed, which met in London. 



A POLITICAL WARNING 215 

An agreement was come to, signed by Lord Iddes- 
leigh on 29th October 1886, and duly given effect 
to. The terms of this Anglo-German Convention 
have been recently made public in a well-informed 
article by Mr. A. Silva White {Scottish Geographical 
Magazine, March 1888), to which I am indebted 
for some of the above facts, and the abstract may 
be given here intact, as political knowledge of Africa 
is not only deficient, but materials for improving it 
are all but inaccessible. In view, moreover, of the 
spirit of acquisitiveness which is abroad among the 
nations of Europe, and of recent attempts on the 
part of Germany to claim more than her title allows, 
the exact terms of this contract ought to be widely 
known : — 

I. Both Powers recognise the sovereignty of the Sultan 
of Zanzibar over the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, Lamu 
and Mafia, as also over those small islands lying within a 
circuit of twelve nautical miles of Zanzibar. Both Powers 
also recognise as the Sultan's possessions on the mainland 
an uninterrupted coast-line from the mouth of the Miningani 
River at the entrance of the bay of Tunghi (south of Cape 
Delgado) as far as Kipini (south of Wito). This line 
encloses a coast of ten nautical miles inland for the whole 
distance. The northern boundary includes Kau ; north 
of Kipini, both Powers recognise as belonging to the Sultan 
of Zanzibar the stations of Kisimayu, Brava, Merka, and 
Makdishu (Magadoxo), each with a land circuit of ten 



216 A POLITICAL WARDING 

nautical miles, and Warsheikh with a land circuit of five 
nautical miles. 

II. Great Britain engages herself to support those 
negotiations of Germany with the Sultan which have for 
their object the farming out ( Verpachtung) of the customs 
in the harbours of Dar-es-Salaam and Pangani to the 
German East African Association, on the payment by the 
Association to the Sultan of an annual guaranteed sum of 
money. 

III. Both Powers agree to undertake a delimitation of 
their respective spheres of influence in this portion of the 
East African Continent. This territory shall be considered 
as bounded on the south by the Rovuma River, and on 
the north by a line, commencing from the mouth of the 
Tana River, following the course of this river or its tribu- 
taries, to the intersection of the Equator with the 38th 
degree of east longitude, and from thence continued in a 
straight line to the intersection of the 1st degree of north 
latitude with the 37th degree ot east longitude. The line 
of demarcation shall start from the mouth of the river 
Wanga, or Umbe, and follow a straight course to Lake 
Jipe (south-east of Kilima-njaro), along the eastern shore 
and round the northern shore of the lake, across the river 
Lumi, passing between the territories of Taveta and Chagga, 
and then along the northern slope of the Kilima-njaro 
range, and continued in a straight line to the point on the 
eastern shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza which is intersected 
by the 1st degree of south latitude. 

Great Britain engages herself to make no territorial 
acquisitions, to accept no Protectorates, and not to com- 
pete with the spread of German influence to the south of 
this line, whilst Germany engages herself to observe a similar 
abstinence in the territories to the north of this line. 



A POLITICAL WARNING 217 

IV. Great Britain will use her influence to promote the 
conclusion of a friendly agreement concerning the existing 
claims of the Sultan of Zanzibar and the German East 
African Association, on the Kilima-njaro territory. 

V. Both Powers recognise as belonging to Wito the 
coast stretching from the north of Kipini to the north end 
of Manda Bay. 

VI. Great Britain and Germany will conjointly call 
upon the Sultan of Zanzibar to recognise the General Act 
of the Berlin Conference, save and except the existing 
rights of His Highness as laid down in Art. I. of the Act. 

VII. Germany binds herself to become a party to the 
Note signed by Great Britain and France on 10th March 
1862, in regard to the recognition of the independence 
of Zanzibar. 



This is the only document which can have any 
validity, and such German claims — outside the limit 
here assigned — as are represented on the newer 
German maps, are to be treated as mere charto- 
graphical flourishes. Encouraged, however, by this 
success in securing territory in Africa, and without 
stopping to use or even to proclaim their pro- 
tectorate over more than a fraction of the petty 
states comprised within it, the Germans instantly 
despatched expedition after expedition to secure 
further conquests in the remoter and unappropriated 
districts. Dr. Karl Peters himself led one large 
expedition ; Dr. Jiihlke negotiated agreements with 



218 A POLITICAL WARNING 

the tribes on the distant Somal coast ; and other 
explorers brought back rare and heavy spoil — on 
paper— to Berlin. So the swallowing up of Africa 
goes on. The slices cut are daily becoming bigger, 
and in a few years more not a crumb of the loaf 
will remain for those who own it now. The poor 
Sultan of Zanzibar, who used to boast himself lord 
of the whole interior, woke up, after the London 
Convention, to find that his African kingdom con- 
sisted of a ten-mile-wide strip of coast-line, extending 
from Kipini to the Miningani River. Even this has 
already been sold or leased to the English and 
Germans, and nothing now remains to His Highness 
but a few small islands. 

Since turning her attention towards Africa, 
Germany has not only looked well after new terri- 
tory, but seized the opportunity to inspect and 
readjust the title-deeds to her other African property. 
We find a new treaty concluded in 1885 between 
her and the British Protectorate in the Niger regard- 
ing the Cameroons ; another towards the close of the 
same year with France on the same subject, and 
securing rights to Malimba and Great Batonga ; and 
a third with Portugal in 1887, defining, in the 
interests of the latter, the boundaries of Angola, 
and ceding to Germany, as a quid -pro -quo, an 



A POLITICAL WARNING 219 

acknowledgment of the claim of the Germans — 
which, of course, England repudiates — to East 
Central Africa from the coast to the south end of 
Tanganyika and Lake Nyassa, as far as the latitude 
of the Rovuma. 

These facts prove the genuine political activity 
of at least one great European power, and offer 
a precedent to England, which, in one respect at 
least, she would do well to copy. Her title-deeds, 
and those of certain districts in which she is 
concerned, are not in such perfect order as to 
justify the apathy which exists at present, and her 
interests in the country are now too serious to be 
the prey of unchallenged ambitions, or left at the 
mercy of any casual turn of the wheel of politics. 

Thanks, partly, to the recent seizure by Portugal 
of the little Zambesi steamer belonging to the 
African Lakes Company — on the plea that vessels 
trading on Portuguese waters must be owned by 
Portuguese subjects, and fly the Portuguese flag — 
and to influential deputations to head-quarters on 
the part of the various Missions, the Foreign Office 
is beginning to be alive to the state of affairs in 
East Central Africa. The annexation of Matabele- 
land will be a chief item on the programme with 
which it is hoped the Government will shortly sur- 



220 A POLITICAL WARNING 

prise us ; but, what is of greater significance, it will 
probably include a declaration of the Zambesi as an 
open river, and the abolition or serious restriction of 
the present customs tariff. Important as these 
things are, however, they affect but slightly the two 
supreme English interests in East Central Africa — 
the suppression of the slave-trade and the various 
missionary and industrial enterprises. The most 
eager among the supporters of these higher interests 
have never ventured to press upon Government any- 
thing so pronounced as that England should declare 
a Protectorate over the Upper Shire and Nyassa 
districts ; but they do contend, and with every 
reason, for the delimitation of part of this region as 
a " Sphere of British Influence." 

Granting even that the shadowy claims of 
Germany and Portugal to the eastern shore of Lake 
Nyassa are to be respected, there remain the whole 
western coast of the Lake, and the regions of the 
Upper Shire which are reached directly from the 
waters of the Zambesi, without trespassing on the 
soil of any nation. These regions are not even 
claimed at present by any one, while by every right 
of discovery and occupation — by every right, in fact, 
except that of formal acknowledgment — they are 
already British. It will be an oversight most culp- 



A POLITICAL WARNING 221 

able and inexcusable if this great theatre of British 
missionary and trading activity should be allowed 
to be picked up by any passing traveller, or become 
the property of whatever European power had 
sufficient effrontery at this late day to wave its flag 
over it. The thriving settlements, the schools and 
churches, the roads and trading-stations, of Western 
Nyassa-land are English. And yet it is neither 
asked that they should be claimed by England, 
annexed by England, nor protected by England. 
Those whose inspirations and whose lives have 
created this oasis in the desert, plead only that no 
intruder now should be allowed to undo their labour 
or idly reap its fruits. Here is one spot, at least, 
on the Dark Continent, which is being kept pure 
and clean. It is now within the power of the 
English Government to mark it off before the world 
as henceforth sacred ground. To-morrow, it may 
be too late. 



X 
A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE 



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4 



